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.

Social Media vs. Social Marketing

It isn't unusual for folks to use "social media" and "social marketing" interchangeably in conversation these days. Although similar sounding, they are actually quite different. You will hear many different definitions of both, but the basics remain distinct.

"Social Media" refers to social interactivity and content creation/collaboration tools/plaforms on the web. The most commonly referenced examples of "social media" are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube; however, there are many different ways for users to share their thoughts, ideas, expertise, as well as collaborate and network online. "Social Media" is an extension of "Web 2.0," which is a term used to describe web applications that provide user-generated content. Web 2.0 encompasses things like blogs, wikis, and podcasts, as well as the social media sites mentioned above.

"Social Marketing" is the use of marketing techniques to influence behavior or social perception, as opposed to marketing a particular product or service. Examples of well know social media campaigns include: environmental behavior change (Crying Indian Campaign), seat belt usage (Dummy Campaign, "You could learn a lot from a dummy!"), Forest Fires (Smokey The Bear Campaign), Anti-Smoking (Truth Campaign), etc... Internationally, "social marketing" is used to combat malaria, AIDS, water and environmental degradation, gender violence,. drug abuse and much more. These "behavior change" campaigns leverage social norms, competition, social networks, careful messaging, and precise targeting effectively influence their audiences.