If you pay much attention to the marketing industry's trends, you no doubt have observed the rapid emergence of social media as a marketing communications channel. If you're a marketer, you know social media and driving intentional, positive online conversation about your brand is important, and needs to be part of your marketing mix. But, like any emerging discipline, it can be hard to know how best to "use" social media and, importantly, assess whether your efforts are wildly successful, a complete waste of time, effort and money, or somewhere in the middle.
Don't worry, the problem isn't you. It's the metric, or rather, up until now, the lack thereof. While we're learning each day about the growing popularity, pervasiveness and influence of social media, we're also working to figure out the best performance metrics to measure its impact. And we're getting better every day.
Established, accepted metrics are critical in any industry because they both declare a benchmark for relative performance and focus resources around what's important. In essence, they put a value on what's valuable. You are what you measure. Mutual Fund managers have the Annualized Rate of Return, CEO's have EBITA and enterprise value, Network Television Executives have audience ratings, and so on. Heck, even NFL head coaches have performance metrics; net points scored per game, and games won over a season (Are you listening, Lovie Smith?). The important thing is that once performance metrics are established and accepted for a discipline, all energy then gets focused on gaming the metric. And that's a good thing.
The recent announcement of Zócalo Group's Digital Footprint Index is a giant step (pun not intended) in the right direction. On an overall basis, the DFI quantifies, at a given point in time, the overall volume of a brand's earned online presence. The DFI's key components, Height (amount of brand conversation), Width (how widely those conversations are shared) and Depth (the tone and sentiment of the brand's conversation) serve to put an important stake in the ground for industry. But does the DFI put a value on what's valuable? You be the judge. For any brand (and its competitors), wouldn't you want to know:
• How much that brand is being talked about in earned conversation?
• If those brand conversations are being passed along?
• If those brand conversations are positive or negative, on message or off?
So with the Digital Footprint Index established, the imperative becomes clear. We need to game the metrics. We need to create more earned conversation for the brand, work to have those conversations more widely shared, and ensure those conversations are increasingly positive and intentional. Those are pretty good metrics to game.
We know the debate about what social media metrics are most appropriate is long from over and rightly so; with new channels for digital conversation being brought forth all the time, a metric is only as good as its ability to quantify all that's relevant and valuable. But the Digital Footprint Index is a quantum leap (pun intended) from what has been previously available and, we hope, spurs even more discussion around this subject.
To paraphrase Albert Einstein, "Sometimes what counts can't be counted." For those of us who endeavor to use social media to drive brand conversation and recommendations, we're getting closer to the day when we'll have agreement on both what and how to count. And when that day arrives, there will likely be no formal celebration or even recognition of that agreement, because we'll all be too busy that day, working to game those metrics.
Don't worry, the problem isn't you. It's the metric, or rather, up until now, the lack thereof. While we're learning each day about the growing popularity, pervasiveness and influence of social media, we're also working to figure out the best performance metrics to measure its impact. And we're getting better every day.Established, accepted metrics are critical in any industry because they both declare a benchmark for relative performance and focus resources around what's important. In essence, they put a value on what's valuable. You are what you measure. Mutual Fund managers have the Annualized Rate of Return, CEO's have EBITA and enterprise value, Network Television Executives have audience ratings, and so on. Heck, even NFL head coaches have performance metrics; net points scored per game, and games won over a season (Are you listening, Lovie Smith?). The important thing is that once performance metrics are established and accepted for a discipline, all energy then gets focused on gaming the metric. And that's a good thing.
The recent announcement of Zócalo Group's Digital Footprint Index is a giant step (pun not intended) in the right direction. On an overall basis, the DFI quantifies, at a given point in time, the overall volume of a brand's earned online presence. The DFI's key components, Height (amount of brand conversation), Width (how widely those conversations are shared) and Depth (the tone and sentiment of the brand's conversation) serve to put an important stake in the ground for industry. But does the DFI put a value on what's valuable? You be the judge. For any brand (and its competitors), wouldn't you want to know:
• How much that brand is being talked about in earned conversation?
• If those brand conversations are being passed along?
• If those brand conversations are positive or negative, on message or off?
So with the Digital Footprint Index established, the imperative becomes clear. We need to game the metrics. We need to create more earned conversation for the brand, work to have those conversations more widely shared, and ensure those conversations are increasingly positive and intentional. Those are pretty good metrics to game.We know the debate about what social media metrics are most appropriate is long from over and rightly so; with new channels for digital conversation being brought forth all the time, a metric is only as good as its ability to quantify all that's relevant and valuable. But the Digital Footprint Index is a quantum leap (pun intended) from what has been previously available and, we hope, spurs even more discussion around this subject.
To paraphrase Albert Einstein, "Sometimes what counts can't be counted." For those of us who endeavor to use social media to drive brand conversation and recommendations, we're getting closer to the day when we'll have agreement on both what and how to count. And when that day arrives, there will likely be no formal celebration or even recognition of that agreement, because we'll all be too busy that day, working to game those metrics.
