How to measure Social Media ROIwith Gary Angel and Scott K. Wilder

2

Gary Angel, President of SemphonicCo-Founder and President of Semphonic, the leading independent web analytics consultancy in the United States. Semphonic provides full-service web analytics consulting and advanced online measurement to digital media, financial services, health&pharma, B2B, technology, and the public sector. Gary blogs at http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel

Introductions

Scott K. Wilder – Social Media Guide and CoachFounded and managed Intuit’s Small Business Online Community and Social Programs. Before Intuit, Scott was the VP of Marketing and Product Development at Kbtoys / eToys, the founder and director of Borders.com, and held senior positions at Apple, AOL, and American Express. Scott is also a founding Board member of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. He received graduate degrees from New York University, The Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University

3

Overview

What we will cover:

This will be a good webinar if….you’ve gained insight into measuring the success of your social efforts – and we don’t mean cocktail parties. This will be a good webinar if….you’ve gained insight into measuring the success of your social efforts – and we don’t mean cocktail parties.

4

It’s an Art and a Science

We will talk mostly about the Science

“Can’t manage what you can’t measure”

5

- Traffic Pattern & Statistics - 75%- Community Member Engagement - 74%- Unique Number of Visitors - 72%- New Member Registration - 70%- Member Satisfaction - 59%- Provide Feedback/Ideation for R&D - 49%- Number of Referrals by Members - 33%- Transition Lurkers into Active Members - 29%- Impact of community on revenue - 27%- Mentions of Organization or Brand on other Community Sites - 27%- Ratio of Comments per Post - 25%- % of Product Forum Posts that receive Answer - 20%- Promotions of Community Members to moderators - 20%- Keywords for Forums and Blogs - 17%- Cost Savings for Customer Service 16%- Ave. # of Customer Service Tickets/Month - 13%- Number of Product Trial Downloads - 12%- Ave. Number of Tech Support tickets/month -11%- Cost Savings for Tech. Support - 11%- Average Time for a response - 10%

What Community/Social Members rate as top-metrics

Source: Forum One – Bill Johnson

6

Targeting the Social Spheres

Your Online PropertiesWeb SiteBlogsCommunities

InfluencersBloggersSocial InfluencersOpinion Leaders

Other websites & Social NetworksBlogsFacebook, Linkedin, etc.Email

7

Your World: From more than 30,000 feet

• Your own Properties are the most powerful, focused and measurable component of ANY social media effort:

> You control the message and the content

> Your audience is already engaged

> You can measure every aspect of visitor behavior

• Make sure your “traditional” sites support your social efforts> Use the traffic you already get – viral efforts need to start somewhere

> Your existing audience is a powerful (and easily reached) research base

• Globalize your Measurement View> A global rollup across sites is essential for good tracking

8

Your World: Investing in a Community

• Embarking on an “owned” community shouldn’t be taken lightly.

9

Your World: Balancing Measurement Goals

• With community efforts, one of the key measurement goals is proving success

> You aren’t giving yourself full credit unless you measure success in terms of marketing, customer support, branding, and product development.

• Measure what really matters? But you can’t measure everything> On the other hand, the more you measure the more confusing your

measurement and reporting can be. At the management level, you need to limit how much you report and compare on.

10

Your World: Focused Reporting

Most of the work in building good reports is getting the RIGHT numbers. Measuring site success for non-Ecommerce Sites takes hard work.

The payoff is a truly useful report – the net value of a site to the company.

11

• Organizational structure usually drives goals

Marketing Product Development Customer Care

To generate leads and / or drive transactions

To integrate learnings/suggestions in product

To enable users to get quality answers fast

-# of leads-# of transactions-Cost per conversion- Engagement Score

-Time / cost of driving innovation in organization-Time to market

-# of answers by users vs. company-# ratings of answers-Resolution rates-Reduction of costs for answers-Customer Satisfaction

How to do these? How to do these? How to do these?

Which department / division owns ‘Social?’Measure what really matters? But you can’t measure everything

Your World: Measuring Success

12

Your World: Marketing Success

• Marketing typically wants to understand the impact of community efforts on reach and conversion.

> Reach: For community efforts, you can measure total traffic but you may be cannibalizing other properties. In general, we recommend tracking long-tail natural search entries and bookmark entries as the most powerful KPIs.

> Conversion: Web Analytics Tools – using a Global Rollup – can track the over time interaction of visitors across properties. This allows you to easily measure cross-visit interactions and over-time interactions. Properly setup, this should allow you to track the conversion value and site engagement of community visitors on your brand properties.

• A global Rollup is the most powerful analytic tool for measuring over-time marketing impact of a community.

13

Your World: Conversion Tracking

Column1 Visit 1 2+ Visit Col Visit 1 2+ Visit

Col Visit 1 2+ Visits

All Site 2.40% 4.25%iew 2.7 5.4 1.4 2.6

Community Users 1.10% 7.14% V 2.1 13.8 0.8 8.2

Purchase Inquiries Product Views Product Details

In every case, community sourced visits performed worse than average.

But community visitors over time performed significantly BETTER than

average.

• Tracking over-time visitor-level data at the Global Rollup level is the RIGHT way to track community impact on success.

Some Outside-the-Box Key Marketing Metrics- Community Integration - Community Independence- Direct Marketing Effectiveness- Halo Marketing Effectiveness

14

Your World: Long-Tail SEO

Branded keyword traffic to communities may not be

particularly desirable. Ditto for high-profile terms well

optimized on the marketing sites. But long-tail traffic is

almost always a win.

• By far the most significant component of new marketing reach from community sites is driven by long-tail SEO. Tracking non-branded SEO keyword traffic is essential.

Some Outside-the-Box Key Marketing Metrics- Incremental Reach- Effective Reach

15

Your World: Product Development

• Product Development and Research are extremely difficult to measure effectively in terms of community contribution.

> Hot-Spots: Reporting on problems by feature is useful but difficult to translate into success. Where it can be trended based on product development efforts (before vs. after) it can be powerful.

> Feature Requests: Reporting on feature requests is also important. If tied to eventual product plans, it is a good measure of success.

> Research Costs: If you can document comparable research costs, this can be used as a measure of cost-avoidance.

• For measurement directed to Product Development and Research, a strong content categorization is ESSENTIAL.

16

Your World: Product Development

Issue Customer quote

Link

Action taken Learnings

XXXXX XXXXXXXX URL XXXXXX

•XXXXX

XXXXX XXXXXXXX URL XXXXXX

•XXXXX

XXXXX XXXXXXXX URL XXXXXX

•XXXXX

XXXXX XXXXXXXX URL XXXXXX

•XXXXX

XXXXX XXXXXXXX URL XXXXXX

•XXXXX

Product Recommendations Report for Product Manager

Our Outside-the-Box Key Product Development Metrics- Issue Rate: Problems by Feature or Application / Total Problems- Feature Requests: Request Count by Feature

17

Your World: Customer Care

• When tracking Customer Care for Communities the two big challenges are defining success and measuring call avoidance.

> Success by Function: Report on Content Exits relative to Routing Exits to measure basic success.

> Inline Success: Use inline survey techniques (ratings, was this helpful, did this answer your question) to measure point success.

> Brand: Use before v. after samples of community visitors to track brand impact. Track brand perception of community users on main site to measure “halo” effect.

> Call Avoidance: Tracking registered users across call-centers is VERY POWERFUL but also VERY CHALLENGING.

• Reporting raw numbers is useless since their meaning will always be questioned – job #1 is to define success.

Our Outside-the-Box Key Customer Support Metrics- Customer Support Efficiency- Search Efficiency- Content Efficiency

18

Your World: Customer Care

Customer Type 1

Customer Type 2

Customer Type 3

Customer Type 4

Customer Type 1

Customer Type 2

Customer Type 3

Customer Type 4

Callers Prior to Optimization

Callers After Optimization

• Call Center integration is the holy-grail for cost-avoidance. But it demands keyed data and good call-center data quality.

Our Outside-the-Box Key Customer Support Metrics- Hard Call Avoidance- Soft Call Avoidance

19

DIY or focus on other sites only

• Look at your total universe to determine if you should have your own community

• Test if other sites can address goals

• Analyze customer/prospect behavior> Survey them!

> What sites they are on

> What activities do they do on these sites

> Frequency and recency

> Monitor them

> Radian6

> Google

20

DIY or focus on other sites only

• Analyze> Site Volumes relative to group volumes – is your site a potential

clearinghouse.

> Offline community – do you have the wherewithal to drive early adoption

> Content Development – do you have potential committed developers

> Seed Content – Bootstrapping is hard – do you have the means for deploying sufficient initial content.

21

The New World: Other Sites

• No matter what - your users spend more time on other sites

> Find and engage with your visitors where they already live

> Talk to them and new audiences that are new to your brand

> Start simple (even if you think big) – you can still be successful

• Job #1 is to find your audience:

> Obvious places – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn

> Not so obvious places – special communities, blogs

• Measure what you can:

> Code and make all links unique, segment social inbounds, baseline and measure community sentiment.

22

Some goals of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter…

Why participate on these sites?

• Brand promotion (protection)

• Customer’s / Audiences’ Outposts

• Home of Influencers

• Learn more about what people are saying

• Answer customer service issues before they spread like wildfire

• …..

23

Organizational structure usually drives goals

Marketing Product Development Customer Care

To generate leads and / or drive transactions

To integrate learnings/suggestions in product

To enable users to get quality answers fast

- # of fans, # of followers- #retweets- views, uniques,- Traffic to your site- Are your competitors there

-Time / cost of driving innovation in organization-Time to market

Sentiment and Mentions vs. Baseline and “Control” communities

How to do these?Google Alerts, Google Blog search, Twitter Search, Sitevolume.com, Social Mention.com

UserVoice.comGetSatisfaction.com

Google, Omiture, Collectiveintellect.com

Other sites: Measuring Success

24

Other Sites: Marketing Tracking

• Make sure to campaign code ALL viral URLs (including tiny URLs) and categorize all referring sources intelligently.

Categorization of Referring Sites (in this case using an Omniture Unified Source Vista Rule) is essential for effective tracking of social traffic.

Some Outside-the-Box Key Marketing Metrics- Social Visits

25

Example using FaceBookFan Page Statistics

> Number of fans to unique visitors (Insight program)

> Document downloaded

> Attachments

> Embeds

> Followers

> Click thrus *using Bitly

> Geography

> Referrals

> Links back to your site

If you have a Facebook Applications

> Daily active users

> Monthly active users

26

Examples using Twitter (influencer)• Number of followers

• Retweets

• Click Thurs

• Monitor conversation around

> Brand name

> Competitors name

> Key words/phrases

> Key contributors

> Impact of posted content

> Which audiences being impacted

• Tools

> Trends TweetMeme.com or OneRiot.com, Tweetlevel, Twinfluence and Twittergrader

> Klout.com

27

The In-Between World: Big Picture

• Influencers are the mediators between your world & the social sphere:

> Consists of customers, partners, employees, etc..

> Represents a disproportionate share of mind on the web

> Play ‘the game telephone’ – amplifying your message

> Convince one influencer and it can be worth thousands of random impressions

> Understand how they use language, technology/media, etc.

> Act as special class of constituent like journalist/investor special tailed programs

• Finding Influencers isn’t hard – talking to them is:> Influencers can’t be engaged en-masse, they require a customized effort.

28

The In-Between World: Big Picture

• Don’t over-automate and don’t over Press:> Don’t send a machine to do a man’s work

> Develop ‘fluid’ contact strategy

• Measure their impact:

> Develop engagement model

> Monitor buzz and track the conversation

> Identify position in social network

Caveat: Just as important to focus on how each user can influence another user

Some Outside-the-Box Key Marketing Metrics- Community Shift- Community Growth

29

A model for Engagement

Source: Ross Mayfield – Ross.Typepad.org

30

•Try and move people towards becoming All-Stars•Build engagement models to measure each bubble segment•Know that almost everyone has ‘star potential’

•Try and move people towards becoming All-Stars•Build engagement models to measure each bubble segment•Know that almost everyone has ‘star potential’

Engagement on your site

Registered but don’t post

Read but don’t register

Recently active and potential to be major contributor

Engagement can start before they get to your site

31

Everyone has ‘star potential’ -- Almost anyone can influenceEveryone has ‘star potential’ -- Almost anyone can influence

Engagement on other sites

Follow your pageAnd participate on page Just read your

content (reach)

Retweet

Some Outside-the-Box Key Marketing Metrics- Segment Shifters

32

Examples of engagement models (Social CRM)

• Leverage traditional direct marketing metrics: (Google Analytics or Omiture)

> Frequency and Recency

> Purchasing / Transactional Behavior

> Cost per lead, contact, etc.

• Combine Traditional DM with Social CRM: (Google, Omiture..backend system)

> Tie to purchasing behavior on your site

> Tie to purchasing behavior on other ecommerce sites (affiliate or tracking code)

> Tie to social sites (referring url or tiny url)

> Tie to Engagement: Participate in event, refer a friend, fill out survey, etc

• Sentiment: (Collective Intellect)

> Measure vis a vis other companies

> Measure on different sites

> Measure what they think of brand (reviews, etc.)

33

10 Take aways

1. 5% rule

2. Organizational Structure impacts metrics

3. Dedicate resource(s)

4. Use Unique, Campaign-Coded URLs for all campaigns (including Tiny URLs)

5. Track visitors not just visits

6. Don’t be afraid of Primary Research – Opinion Research is a powerful tool for identifying and tracking your audience

7. Think about Private Panels to track and find your audience

8. Categorize your referring sites and group them intelligently to measure overall social effort

9. Measure everything you need to prove success – but use as few metrics as possible in conveying your message.

Don’t forget to listen!Don’t forget to listen!

34

What Community Managers are tracking*:- Traffic Pattern & Statistics - 75%- Community Member Engagement - 74%- Unique Number of Visitors - 72%- New Member Registration - 70%- Member Satisfaction - 59%- Provide Feedback/Ideation for R&D - 49%- Number of Referrals by Members - 33%- Transition Lurkers into Active Members - 29%- Impact of community on revenue - 27%- Mentions of on other Community Sites - 27%- Ratio of Comments per Post - 25%- % of Product Forum Posts s with answer - 20%- Keywords for Forums and Blogs - 17%- Cost Savings for Customer Service 16%- Number of Product Trial Downloads - 12%- Ave. Number of Tech Support tickets/month -11%- Cost Savings for Tech. Support - 11%-Average Time for a response - 10%

Some Tools:-Google Analytics-Omiture Site Catalyst-Google Alerts-Bit.ly-Klout-Blog Pulse-Radian6-Google Alerts-Twitter Search-Site Volume-SocialMention.com-User Voice-GetSatisfaction.com-Collective Intellection

Source: Forum One – Bill Johnson

Metrics Menu

35 Source: Forum One – Bill Johnson

Metrics Menu10 Things to think about:- 5% rule- Organizational Structure impacts metrics- Dedicate resource(s)- Use Unique, Campaign-Coded URLs for all campaigns (including Tiny URLs)- Track visitors not just visits- Don’t be afraid of Primary Research – Opinion Research can identifying audience- Think about Private Panels to track and find your audience- Categorize your referring sites & group them intelligently to measure overall social effort- Measure everything you need to prove success- Pay attention to verbatims too

Our Outside-the-Box Key Marketing Metrics- Incremental Reach: New Visitors to the Community from Non-Branded Natural Search- Effective Reach: Direct Community Traffic + Non-Competitive Search Traffic Visits / All Visits- Community Independence: Visits sourced on a main site that drive to a community / Total Community Visits- Community Integration: Visits sourced on the community that drive to a main site- Direct Marketing Effectiveness: Visits that include community and a main site measure of success / all community visits- Halo Marketing Effectiveness: Visitors that include community and a main site measure of success / all visitors- Social Visits: Social Visits / Total Visits- Community Growth: Mentions in Target Community / Baseline Mentions- Community Shift: Mentions in Target Community Growth / Mentions in Control Community Growth- Segment Shifters: +/- Flows between Identified Segments in internal and influencer communities

36 Source: Forum One – Bill Johnson

Metrics Menu

Our Outside-the-Box Key Customer Support Metrics- Customer Support Efficiency: Content Exits / Support Entries (Search + Support Routes)- Search Efficiency: Content Exits / Searches- Content Efficiency: Internal Survey Sat or Accomplished Rating- Brand Enhancement: Avg. Sat Score of Sample Before Community Use – Avg. Sat Score of After Community Use- Brand Halo: Avg. Sat Score of Main Site visitors with Community Usage vs. Avg. Sat Score of Main Site visitors without (Segmented by visitor type)- Hard Call Avoidance: Content Success Visits by Registered Community wo Call to Center- Soft Call Avoidance: Content Success Visits

Our Outside-the-Box Key Product Development Metrics- Issue Rate: Problems by Feature or Application / Total Problems- Feature Requests: Request Count by Feature- Social Issue Rate: Problems by Feature or Application / Total Problems- Social Requests: Request Count by Feature

37

To learn more….

• Contact Gary Angel: gangel@semphonic.com 415-493-2582

> http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/

• Contact Scott K. Wilder: skwilder@mac.com