Thoughts on Measuring Social Media

Katie Delahaye Paine has been a long-time expert, advocate, and influencer on how to measure PR. Now, she’s published an excellent white paper on “How to Measure Social Media Relations.” I strongly recommend you download a copy if you haven’t already.

While I agree with a vast majority of Katie’s observations and recommendations, there are a few areas I take exception. People who know me say that’s always the case; I never agree with everything. Here are just a few highlights from Katie’s report:

• like other forms of communications, companies should define objectives before trying to devise a social media measurement strategy. It’s been my experience that different companies want to measure social media in different ways, so there may never be a “one-fits-all” methodology that works for everyone in this space;
• social media measurement can be broken down into three main areas - outcomes (measuring how blogs affect people’s behavior and relationships); outtakes (understanding how social media is contributing to the social capital of a company); and outputs (how many people are paying attention to what you are saying and doing in online communities). Katie goes into much greater detail on specific ways to measure these three areas; and,
• organizations should use social media insights to draw actionable conclusions and develop forward-thinking action plans.

The main areas I disagree with her though is on social media content gathering and analysis. The report states that “the vast majority of conversation is teenage chatter … and while a traditional media feed such as Factiva will deliver about 90% relevant content, the opposite is true with social media. Due to the limitation of automated content gathering, typically only about 10% will be relevant to the topic at hand.”

You can read into that a few different ways, but there have been siginficant technology advancements in social media content collection and analysis over the past two years. Speaking from personal experience, we are delivering a much higher level of relevant content to clients from all types of CGM communities.

Katie also rightly recognizes that some of the most valuable insights on the Web are contained within the millions of comments exchanged on blogs each day, but she is unaware that there are companies like ours that are already collecting and analyzing those comments. Yes it’s tough to do, but it is being done.

After all these years, Katie remains an authority in communications measurement, but if you follow the industry you probably already know that.

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