Measuring What…?

I have a friend whose sole job is to measure the success of social media - that is, the metrics on what prospects and customers are thinking and feeling and sharing in the social sharing/networking world of Web 2.0…

I hear his next gig is threading a camel through the eye of a needle!

But seriously, his job as a “social media analyst” is no easy feat, although not unattainable. It just takes a very different approach than gathering hard traffic data (# unique visitors, page views, etc.)

Social media has “softer,” more nebulous metrics - that being the moods and resulting actions taken by people. You need your web marketer to “take the temperature” of the blogosphere/forums/videosphere/networking sphere as it relates to your products or services.

Bad chatter is better than no chatter at all

Sometimes the mood online is warm/fuzzy, and you get to watch the growth of “fansumers” for your goods. Niiice. But what about the naysayers?

You want to know about them, too - and respond in the appropriate social media channels. Think of this space as a giant, free focus group: Who’s hot under the collar, and why? What’s leaving consumers cold - and how might their frosty reception be proactively engaged with to address the concerns?

Then measure those social media sentiments against what was being experienced last week/month/year. And - this is important - put those feelings-translated-into-actions firmly in context, looking at all possible variables.

Rob Clark, of Social Media Group, recognized this when he blogged:

“…your podcast had 1,000 downloads today, but it resulted in only a handful of positive leads for your sales staff. Last week, with fraction the number of downloads, you had twice the results. The reason being that the bump in traffic came from a pop culture site with millions of visitors that found an aspect of your program amusing, and linked to it. None of those people were, nor would they ever be, customers of your custom molded pipes. And this upcoming weekend being the big plumbing supplies conference, your typical audience is likely on the road.”

The metrics of sentiment

Social media consultants (good ones) look beyond straight numbers, to find patterns of behaviour, and a client’s share of online conversation (benchmarked against conversation about your competitors) - as well as sentiment valuation: negative, positive or neutral online reviews of services and products.

Speaking of which, I recently came across a fascinating bit of research being done by - who else? - Google in its “Study on Sentiment Summation.” [PDF] The paper defines a new delivery model for aggregating search results as “a trend toward systems that can automatically summarize opinions from a set of reviews and display them in an easy to process manner.”

Given the massive, and continuing, growth of user-generated content, figuring out how to sum up the feelings of those users is getting more and more important.

Stay tuned for search results that come with smells (a floral squirt means “I love this”) or sounds (raspberry-blow for “this sucks”)…?!