The first Measurement Camp of 2009

Measurement Camp, an initiative started by Will McInnes of Nixon McInnes, had its first event of this year today. One of the things I genuinely appreciate about the group is that they do not make lofty claims of being able to find the one-size-fits-all solution to the question of how social media can be measured effectively. As the days go by, I am finding myself increasingly fatigued by the use of the terms ‘social media’, ‘digital’ and so on and so forth. I know I work in this industry and that is no way an indication of my fatigue with the industry itself, but of the frequency with which these terms are thrown around as if their use is what makes a person creditable. So it was a relief to see the no-nonsense approach that Will and the group took.

We were presented a case study and questions to tackle, details of which you can read here. Essentially, we had to come up with a social media strategy (they said it, not me!) to achieve the client’s aims, benchmark and measure success using traditional marketing metrics and note if any were ‘hard to measure’.

We broke into 3 separate groups to brainstorm. The results will probably be put up on the wiki soon, but our group essentially came up with this: Advertise a competitive cycling event on Facebook/MySpace/Bebo/Twitter/(insert any social networking site here), which would have its own microsite. This site would contain links to local community cycling groups (and vice-versa), so it would be easy to track how many people came through from which source. At the event, offline data would also be collected from participants regarding how they heard about the event. Anyway, the outcome of our bit was that using click-through and site analytics data, it would be relatively easy to measure the impact of all social media/online effort.

Lloyd Davis then came up with a rather intriguing (and yet ridiculously simple) remark: since actual advertising/PR spend (both online and off) can be logged, and profit from sales of cycles can as well (ultimate client objective), simply subtract the first from the second to get the qualitative or unmeasurable impact (blogger mentions and so on).

Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that – we discussed and debated the pros and cons of traditional advertising, the marketing channels that could be used (PPC, print ads, Net Promoter Scores, radio ads, posters in schools given that the target audience was 8-16 years old etc. etc.) and there were plenty of interesting suggestions which I won’t get into here.

What I will mention is a few of the points/questions that came up during the final presentation of all our efforts (or those that I consider noteworthy):

-       Can there be a set of ‘general social media metrics’ when each campaign is unique?

-       Is there a place that we can log the actual impact of different campaigns so everyone can see the metrics on a case-by-case basis and evaluate accordingly? Something the wiki should cater to, I think…

-       Whereas the cost of traditional advertising can be measured (you know how much you pay for a page ad and what the readership of a paper is), the cost of social media marketing/PR can’t be measured (you can pay a digital PR/social media agency for a blogger outreach programme but there is no guarantee of how many of them will mention your product eventually).

A good session.