The days of social media for social media sake are over. The rationale for engaging with consumers online is clear. The actual impact of those activities is not. 
 
Brand Managers are now demanding deliberate metrics to evaluate the performance of both their campaigns, and of the brand's overall online health. And, many communications and marketing agencies are scrambling to build their own proprietary methods for measuring the effectiveness of their own campaigns.
 
In the past week, we have seen an increase in announcements of industry standard social media measurement tools for quantifying the total volume of conversation and the sentiment of those discussions. However, their definition of a conversation, in fact, how we define a conversation as an overall industry, has come to mean any mention of a brand online regardless of its impact. A conversation requires engagement between two or more parties. What each of the proposed methods lack are this vital component for differentiating between awareness versus engagement - and ultimately, the effectiveness of online conversation toward driving business objectives.
 
Zócalo Group identified a need for greater accountability in how the industry as a whole evaluates earned conversation. Together with DePaul University, we developed the Digital Footprint Index. Critical to this method for measurement, and unaccounted for in all previous methods, was evaluating the actual engagement by consumers with online content. This engagement metric, called Width within the DFI, is essential to understanding whether consumers are truly impacted by a brand's online presence.
 
Essentially, the DFI measures the effectiveness of a brand's earned conversation by answering three questions.
 

• How much content about your Brand exists across all social media channels? (i.e. Blogs, Forums, Twitter, Facebook, Photo & Video Sharing sites)
• How engaged are consumers with these messages? (i.e. evidenced by interactions as comments, replies, favorites, and social bookmarks)
• Is the content positive or negative in nature, and is the brand being talked about in a way consistent with their messaging objectives?

 
The result of these three questions fall into three simple measures - Height, Width, and Depth.
 
The Digital Footprint is not meant to be an industry standard. However, the methodology behind it is something we feel is important to share in order to catalyze an industry conversation toward greater accountability and consistency in how we measure the effectiveness of a brand's earned conversation.
 
Below are links to more in-depth descriptions of how the Height, Width, and Depth of a brand's Digital Footprint provide the comprehensive narrative --
 
 

 
As Nicholas Kinports, Digital Integration Manager at Maddock Douglas and author of ADMAVEN - The Interactive Advertising Blog, pointed out in his criticism of recently proposed measurement methodologies -
 

"Having a simple and standard metric for perception versus online behaviors will be important going into the future." [from AdAge]

 
There is a real demand for consistency and simplification in social media measurement. However, we believe the development of such a tool should be the product of an industry-wide collaboration.

Please feel free to comment with the types of behaviors and metrics you feel are important for consideration going forward. It is through a common language and understanding of what really drives earned conversation that we can come to agree upon what truly matters to meaningful measurement.