Social Media Metrics - A conversation w/ Ken Chen

I get asked all the time about how utilities should measure their social media efforts. It is an important piece of the social media puzzle for utilities, since we are measurement driven organizations. It is also easy to believe the hype that there is no effective way to measure social media, but that is simply not the case.

A lot of smart people, like respected social media and marketing consultant Ken Chen (Founder of EM Marketing), flatly reject the “no metrics” assertion and actually see the opposite. For Ken, the very nature of the web provides marketers and communicators plenty of data points they could have only dream of twenty years ago. These metrics can be found both inside and outside your site, including traffic, engagement, participation, velocity of talk, sentiment and your content uptake. As a side note, it is critical to get your baseline measurements, or access to past data sets, before you swing into action…otherwise, gaining context is significantly more difficult.

"Bah!...some of those are old metrics" you say? Well, Ken's approach to social media measurement reflects an appropriately holistic and goal-oriented view of your online marketing and communications efforts. Social media is not an end, but rather a means. It is critical to clearly understand and define what the end game really is for your utility's social media efforts (program participation, information sharing, customer care/service, brand building. etc...?). Once you are clear on that piece, the metrics, both new and old, will begin to fall into place and make a lot more sense moving forward.