Over the last few months, Susan Etlinger, a former marketing strategist, and most importantly has used brand monitoring tools, has lead Altimeter’s latest research report on analytics. After interviewing nearly 40 experts and working with Charlene Li and a bit of help from myself, she’s found six distinct use cases (see compass below) on how companies are measuring using these new toolsets.
We know that measurement is the the top goal inside of companies, and while I’ve published this data before, it’s important to recast it to show the important of measurement in an emerging technology set.
Why are social analytics so important?
- This is a new medium, and proof over re allocation of investment is key.
- Being a new tool set, there’s a lot of experimentation and it’s important to see what will actually make a change,
- It’s a very difficult medium to track, unlike transactional advertising, social engagement is hard to tie to point of sale or conversion.
- Since most social media programs are not tied to existing systems in support, marketing, and product innovation, it’s very difficult to collect the disparate data and make sense of it
Framework: Social Media Measurement Compass
In particular, I’m fond of how the report lays out a measurement strategy based on organizational model and maturity, there are different strategies to deploy depending on the internal structure. You may recognize these five states from the research I’ve been doing over the past few years
How to Organize for Social Media Measurement
Read the report, print it out, and share with others. The more you share it, the easier it is for us to produce more. Read Susan’s post announcing this report. I’ll link to posts that add to the discussion below.
Look forward to reading it – more than ROI – a holistic view as to where you should be taking social media activities – is fundamental. The compass idea illustrates this clearly.
that’s already been decided – I am eager also to see the feeback
I liked this report a lot. Good critical perspective on social analytics. We starting investing in social analytics back in 2007, but really from a different angle (not a product plug, just want to give perspective). Our investment was solely inward looking, i.e. what are people doing within the on-domain community?
Where we have seen people struggle with social analytics, almost contrary to the opening premise of the report “…data intensive, messy, and unstructured…” is that you really can analyze just about everything. It quickly becomes overwhelming as you being to examine the variety of reports and metrics that are available.
I’d love to see more research / analysis into specific business use cases. We’ve done some of this, but I’d love to see Altimeter (or someone else) really take the lead and craft the type of social metrics that matter for different business use cases. For example, a digital marketing community cares about different metrics than a B2B community vs a support community.
Maybe a good opportunity for another one of your vendor round-tables!
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