Why Are Marketers So Bad At Measuring Social Media? (And How Can They Get Better?)

[Posted by Nate Elliott. Follow me on twitter.]

Marketers don't think they're very good at measuring social media.  When my colleague Emily Riley asked marketers to rate their ability to measure the impact of their social media initiatives, the average grade they gave themselves was 4.5 out of 10. Not a great score -- especially given that accountability is one of the key selling points of interactive marketing. So I've spent a lot of time this year trying to understand why marketers aren't good at measuring social media -- and how they can do better.

The fact is, social media marketers are drowning in a sea of metrics. Every social platform and vendor offers its own metrics, and there are literally hundreds of ways to measure the success of social initiatives. With so many numbers to choose from, and so little insight into which metrics are important, it's not surprising that marketers feel overwhelmed.

Most marketers fixate on easily-available measures like followers or fans -- regardless of whether those metrics are important. Many others fail to measure obviously useful numbers just because they're not on the first page of a report. A marketer focused on talking [video] should have a radically different definition of success than one focused on embracing [video]. But marketers are much more likely to tailor their social media measurement to the tools they're using than to the objectives they're trying to achieve. Have a look -- most marketers measure pretty much the same metrics, no matter what their objective:

It's obvious that marketers need more clarity into which social media metrics they should be tracking. So we've developed a simple three-step process to help marketers better tailor their measurement strategies to the objectives they're pursuing. Walking through these three steps will help you cut through the clutter on your marketing reports and measure your social media initiatives more effectively:

• Step 1: Think back to your marketing objective. Go back and find your notes from when you were first planning your social marketing effort -- and remind yourself of the objective you were pursuing. If you don't know what your goal was, you'll never know what you should be measuring, or if you succeeded.
• Step 2: Consider what types of metrics signal success. Don't think about specific lines on a report yet -- instead, think about what types of consumer behaviors and sentiments match your objectives, and focus your measurement on those categories of metrics. If your goal was energizing, success is defined as lots of people saying positive things about your brand; if your goal was supporting, you want to know if users were providing good advice to each other -- and whether it kept users from having to ask you for support directly.  Again, this isn't about specific metrics, it's about how you hoped your social initiative would change your relationship with consumers.
• Step 3: Look for that category of metric in the social technology you're using. Once you've identified the type of metric that will signal success, then you can look for ways to track those metrics within the social platform you're using. This is when you should get into the specifics of which lines on the report Facebook or Jive gives you are most important -- and which other vendors you need to use to find the exact numbers you're looking for.

In my new report, 'Three Steps To Measuring Social Media Marketing,' I offer a framework that helps marketers place social media metrics into one of six categories, shows them which categories of metrics should be used to measure which objectives, and gives examples of how to obtain those metrics from each social platform. I hope clients use my framework; I think it will make their lives easier and their measurement more successful.

But the key message of that report (and this blog post) isn't the framework, it's this call to action: We as an industry must do better at measuring social media marketing. Social media budgets keep rising, but that trend won't continue forever if we can't prove that social initiatives are effective. Perhaps more important, if we don't know which social applications succeeded and which didn't, we can't learn from our experiences and improve on future efforts. And it's surprisingly easy to measure social media effectively: we just need to focus on measuring objectives rather than technologies.

Whether you use the detailed framework in my report, or simply keep these three steps in mind as you design your own measurement strategy, I hope these ideas help you sift through all the social media metrics that are available, and find the right ones to measure your efforts.

Participate In Our Research

Want to see how your Interactive Marketing budget plan compares with that of your peers?  Interested to see if you have the same view of Social Media as others in your role?  We're conducting a survey of Interactive Marketers and we need your help!  If you know about your company's Interactive Marketing or Social Media strategies, please take our short survey!

In exchange for your participation, we offer the following:

Your choice of one of three complimentary research pieces immediately upon your completion.

A spreadsheet with the aggregate results when the research is complete.

A copy of the research based on the data we collect.

The survey is quick (10 to 15 minutes), we only publish responses in aggregate, and we respect your privacy.  We'll be running it until the end of the year, but please take the survey as soon as possible.  Feel free to spread the word to your colleagues and peers as well!

If you have any questions, please contact me directly:  tcummings@forrester.com

Thanks!

Tom Cummings
Researcher, Interactive Marketing
tcummings@forrester.com

P.S. This is a separate survey from the Customer Reference Survey by Laura Ramos and Merv Adrian that is posted below.  If you've already participated in that one, you are more than welcome to participate in this one, and vice versa!

Numeric Scoring: The Key To Lead Management Success

[Posted by Laura Ramos]

Recently I saw a preview of Eloqua’s spring release and it got me thinking about the role lead scoring plays in determining campaign effectiveness.  I hadn’t seen the product in a while and was impressed with the UI improvements the Eloqua team has produced. They have added new capabilities for delivering highly personalized direct mail, SMS/voice reminders, and on-demand fax and RSS delivery – interesting stuff that, while I’d need to talk to a client or two to be convinced of their specific usefulness, show that Eloqua is delivering a broader range of lead nurturing, drip marketing capabilities. Lastly, new campaign design UI will help shorten the time it takes to get first campaigns up and running.

With these changes, I see Eloqua – like many of the other firms I mentioned in my prior post – moving the B2B marketing conversation ahead in an important direction. The key to getting a campaign up and running quickly is not to make it easier to launch more campaigns but instead to focus marketing attention on the results – well qualified leads. And this is where I think the marketing rubber hits the sales road.

As an analyst who has written about lead management extensively – I am still amazed at how many marketers feel challenged to produce leads that sales appreciate. The bickering between marketers (who feel sales doesn’t follow up on the great leads they generate) and sales (who feel the quality of said leads is subject to debate) seems to continue unabated. The few marketers who end the arguing figure out early that quantifying lead quality is essential.

In my view, these marketers live by four best practices. They:
1) Sit with sales, talk about leads, and come to an agreement about what is a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). What are the characteristics of a lead that make it worth working from sales perspective?  And they are prepared to have this conversation every quarter.

2) Assign numeric scores to the different criteria – both explicit (size, industry, title, budget, etc.) and implicit (behavior, activity, interest, etc.) – that both sales and marketing believe distinguish hot leads from the rest. Specific criteria carry specific point values, like +5 for downloading a white paper and +15 for attending a webinar.

3) Use these criteria and weights to score raw leads (contacts, inquiries, replies, etc.), and set a numeric threshold that leads must attain before they earn the MQL status and get passed to sales. They also adjust scores downward as contacts go inactive or age.

4) Rescore contacts place in nurturing, education, or development campaigns. They work to understand what optimum scores are for each category of lead type.  This score can vary by product line or geography or other company-specific factors, so they don’t assume that one size fits all. Again, scores change with activity levels and age.

Is this all there is to demonstrating campaign effectiveness?  No, but it’s a start. Using numerical, quantifiable scores to grade leads turns the art of marketing into a science and marketers who use this approach tell me numeric scoring is one of the biggest factors in raising marketing’s value to the sales organization. But like most good science, it takes time and effort to perfect.  So I commend Eloqua on their next generation of marketing software and their efforts dedicated to the process of making marketing more accountable.

I would like to hear about your scoring approaches and what you have done to achieve a common definition of qualified leads with sales.

Tags: B2B marketing, lead management, lead scoring :: Add to del.icio.us

Desperately Seeking B2B Benchmarks

Here’s a question that crops up more and more frequently.  Forrester B2B marketing clients want to know “What are the average conversion rates for leads to opportunities and opportunities to sales in......?”  You can fill in the blank with:

Industry:   high tech, financial services, healthcare etc.
Tactic:   email marketing, paid search placement, direct mail postcards, etc.
Size:   small businesses, enterprises, firms over $250M in revenue, etc.
Product type:  durable, consumer, high technology, software, etc.
Channel:   direct sales, telesales, distributors, resellers, etc.

And create a tremendous array of opportunities to research.  Opportunities so vast it boggles my mind, and makes me wonder how Forrester might provide this kind of information on a reliable, relevant basis at minimum cost to ourselves and our clients.

In the spirit of exploring this dilemma further, I’d like to hear from our blog readers – B2B in particular – on these two questions:

1) What specific sources of information have you found for these types of benchmarks?  (Go ahead and mention competitors, you won’t hurt my feelings…) And how detailed, or reliable, do these sources need to be?

2) Those of you who have this need yourself, what is the burning issue behind the question? Why do you need this information? Or how would you put it to work?

If you’d rather chat privately about this, send me an email at lramos@forrester.com.

Tags: B2B marketing, marketing benchmarks, conversion rates:: Add to del.icio.us

New Research On Engagement

We've just published a new report titled Marketing's New Key Metric: Engagement.

The link is here. [UPDATE 8/13, 2pm (Eastern): This link redirects to a page on the Forrester Web site which includes the executive summary. The full report is accessible to Forrester clients.]

The premise behind the report is that the center of the marketing funnel (consideration and preference) is more complex than many like to believe. This complexity is largely influenced by people's changing behaviors online, fueled by social computing.

As a result, marketers need to focus on engagement. In the report, we define engagement as:

Engagement is the level of involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence an individual has with a brand over time.

The four components of engagement are:

Involvement—Includes web analytics like site traffic, page views, time spent, etc. This essentially is the component that measures if a person is present.

Interaction—This component addresses the more robust actions people take, such as buying a product, requesting a catalog, signing up for an email, posting a comment on a blog, uploading a photo or video, etc. These metrics come from e-commerce or social media platforms.

Intimacy—The sentiment or affinity that a person exhibits in the things they say or the actions they take, such as the meaning behind a blog post or comment, a product review, etc. Services such as brand monitoring help track these types of conversations.

Influence—Addresses the likelihood that a person will recommend your product or service to someone else. It can manifest itself through brand loyalty or through recommendations to friends, family, or acquaintances. These metrics mostly come from surveys (both qualitative and quantitative).

Our argument is that companies need to start tying these metrics together to make sense of how engaged their customers actually are—and then make product and marketing decisions based on that knowledge.

Now, there's no clean and beautiful equation like e = mc². But as we continue this research on the topic and gather feedback (we've already seen some extremely polarizing reviews of the report), we'd love to get your take on the matter.

What is engagement to you? How do you measure it? What obstacles do your typically encounter? If you're a vendor of analytics services or technology, how do you help clients measure this complexity? And what should the next Engagement report be about?

Research Agency CEOs at ARF re:think

The second day of the ARF's re:think conference opened with a panels research agency executives, called "The Research Agency of the Future" with the CEOs of GfK, Kantar, TNS and Nielsen.  Moderator Jim Figura of Colgate-Palmolive said it should have been called "Insights Agency of the Future."

Most of what these CEOs had to say didn't get beyond what you can read in the press today.  Thus as Joe Mandese wrote in his post on the official re:think blog, the interesting parts of the panel came from reading between the lines.  In fact, most of the talking points were so generic that I didn't know what company was being referenced for the middle two speakers.  GfK was introduced by the moderator and Nielsen went last by process of elimination.  But for Kantar and TNS, it was a few minutes before I knew what company was being represented.  This was because none of the CEOs told the audience their name, title, or company when they took the podium - they all just started talking.  Perhaps these guys are rockstars of research to the ARF audience.

Klaus Wübbenhorst from GfK proposed his company was best positioned to help businesses - after all, GfK stands for "growth from knowledge."  I asked Klaus about GfK's brand monitoring plans after the panel.  No response - he looked at me as if I had just asked him to go a grab me a coffee with cream and two sugars.  I asked again, mentioning how TNS and Nielsen were building capabilities in the space.  He mumbled something to the effect of "sure, it's important."  I asked him if he thought brand monitoring were an important capability for a research firm to have in its portfolio.  Certainly a slow-pitch underhand softball in my book, but it must have looked more like a Matsusaka gyroball. No response.  Pretty clear he just wanted me to leave; unfortunately, I had to in order to deliver my breakout session.  Note to Klaus:  70 million and growing.  Think about it.

Credit to Eric Salama from Kantar who was aware enough that the Blackberry in his pocket was creating interference with the mic.  Salama says it's time to mind the gap between what research firms promise and what they deliver.  His firm's strategy hasn't changed for four years, built on three principles: people, innovation, and data quality.  I asked Eric about brand monitoring, too.  He said none of his companies were doing it.  I asked about Visible Technologies - he said, "yes, we have a partnership with them."

David Lowden from TNS had this to say:  "The research company of the future will be a partner with its clients."  "Cost-effective servicing is an increasingly important issue, but quality must remain."  "Clients will only commit to insight that positively impacts business in a meaningful way."  He did mention the Cymfony acquisition as part of their efforts to stay cutting edge.

David Calhoun from Nielsen was certainly different in appearance - he was the only panelist sans jacket.  He also heavily referenced his client-side experience, which others did not.  Calhoun was formerly at GE and mentioned his experience and mentors from there both in his prepared remarks as well as the Q&A.  These remarks certainly pointed out management acumen that puts The Nielsen Company in good hands - hopefully Calhoun will be able to change the industry standard as well and help marketers make advertising work.

Measuring Success: Where to Start?

By Julie Katz - Researcher, Marketing, Forrester

Saying that measurement is important to marketers is an understatement.  Business decisions, even compensation, rely on the data marketers collect about customers.  Megan Burns and Christine Overby presented on what data marketers should collect, how to collect it, and how to make the best use of the data available.  Megan emphasized how important it is to measure what actually matters to customers rather than what marketers think customers care about.  As Pete Kim said in his keynote address, "easy to say, hard to do."  Megan outlined some initial steps:

First lay out the steps in your customer's lifecycle (and use personas you may have created since different customers have different needs).  Then use primary research to identify touch points and key attributes. Measure both from a customer and a business perspective.  But don't stop looking at that data once the design phase is complete:  keep using it to close the loop and measure how well you deliver on your goals.  And, use that data to improve your programs.

Metrics can help guide responses to flaws in the customer experience.  Vail Resorts uses Net Promoter and customer satisfaction surveys to measure the top drivers of customer referral.  They've taken responses to their surveys to implement grooming and safety patrols specific to the different ski slopes they manage.  Danskin used customer satisfaction to inform a recent site redesign and found both an increase in customers' likelihood to recommend and significant increases in conversions and sales.

Are you a client-side marketer or brand monitoring vendor?

If you're a client-side marketer or brand monitoring vendor, I need your help.  I'm kicking off new research and want to hear from you.

• Client-side marketer:  I will be keynoting Forrester's upcoming Marketing Forum and presenting new research.  I want to hear how you're getting along with reinventing the marketing organization, so join our research panel to voice your opinions.  Be sure to choose the "marketing leadership" box.

   

• Brand/blog/social media monitoring vendor:  In the wake of the TNS/Cymfony deal, I'll be revisiting this space sooner rather than later.  I've heard from many new firms in the space - send me a ping to make sure you're on my radar.  Best way - leave a comment with your name, email address, and URL.  Alternately, you can email me at [pea kay eye emm] @ forrester dot com with the information.  We'll be back in touch with you within the next week or so to ask some questions.
  
  This universe includes companies like 1st2c, Attentio, Beechwood, Biz360, Brandimensions, Collective Intellect, Cymfony, Fluxmonitor, iCrossing, Janya, Mindcomet, MotiveQuest, NameProtect, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Relative Noise, Umbria, Verisign, Visible Technologies, Vocus, and WagEd.  If you're a vendor and that list didn't get your attention...you need to improve your product!

Thanks for your help.

TNS Media Intelligence acquires Cymfony

The news is out - TNS has acquired Cymfony.  The new operating unit will be called TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony.

I'm not surprised - in my opinion, this was inevitable.  In the Forrester Brand Monitoring Wave, published in September 2006, one of the clear conclusions was that Cymfony would be a great fit with a large research firm like TNS. 

Did they sell too early?  From what I can see, mainstream attention is just starting to turn towards brand monitoring services.  In my conversations with vendors, everyone loves the fact that Nielsen brought attention to the space - now TNS ratchets it up a notch - and my Forrester wave helped validate the market as well.  But nobody wants to sell too early - like selling the rights to the Nike logo for $35 - and thus the market has been dating around, but not making long-term commitments.

Now, expect additional activity in the brand monitoring market.  Other conclusions from the Wave:

• Agencies will boost their market research capabilities.  I think this is the next big deal to be announced. MotiveQuest is the most likely candidate here.
• PR services agencies upgrade their offerings.  Not yet, but WagEd launched their own product  called Narrative Network.  Biz360 is a great fit for one of these firms - some of which could benefit from better social media skills.
• Nielsen Buzzmetrics will go public.  Wrong.  No IPO in sight as the measurement juggernaut formerly known as VNU builds an integrated measurement offering.  But now they have a challenger.
• Factiva will boost consumer capabilities.  Nope.  They were consumed by Dow Jones in December.  What this foreshadows, however, is the impending forward integration of data source owners, like Verisign.  Or at least starting to charge a premium for their services.

So who's next?  Well, the only ones I didn't mention yet are Brandimensions and Umbria.  For BrandDimensions, it'll mean selling off half the business, i.e. BrandIntel. I think Umbria will follow in the path of Buzzmetrics and Cymfony, getting paired up with a major research firm.  BTW did you know Umbria's CEO is the former CMO of IRI?

Too bad I didn't include a line in there about me becoming a billionaire!  Congratulations to Jim Nail, former Forrester analyst and Cymfony's CSO/CMO.

So You Know Your Net Promoter Score . . . Now What?

Hi – It’s Christine Overby here, and I’m currently working on research about Net Promoter. I got the idea after participating in a Forrester leadership board session where everyone in the room seemed to be using Net Promoter. One client asked a great question: “Is Net Promoter the only real metric that matters?”

My first reaction was: No!

Don’t get me wrong. Net Promoter is a great tool. It’s straightforward, easy-to-implement, and Fred Reichheld and team have oodles of data showing the correlation between a firm’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) and its growth. But I wonder: If we focus on NPS exclusively, do we miss the nuances and other indicators of growth and profitability?

For example, what if Best Buy’s “demon” customers were the lionshare of its promoters? If this were true, then a singular focus on Net Promoter might drive growth, but profits would go down the tube.

Also, isn’t a promoter with great influence (a “connector” in Malcolm Gladwell’s world) more valuable than one who, for whatever reason, isn’t always taken so seriously?

A final food for thought: if your NPS is nearly identical to that of your direct competitor’s, then are you truly on par? My colleague Chloe Stromberg just pointed out that Facebook and MySpace have Net Promoter Scores of 37% and 36%, respectively, with teens who are active “social shoppers”. Facebook has a higher percent of passive customers – 26% compared to MySpace’s 16%; whereas MySpace has a higher percentage of both detractors and promoters. This additional color seems critical when taking action.

It strikes me that in order for companies to unlock growth and profits, marketers must look at NPS alongside other metrics like growth by customer segment and lifetime value.

We’ve only just begun this research, so I’d be curious to get your thoughts. Is Net Promoter the only real metric that matters? Is it, to borrow Fred Reichheld’s phrase, “The Ultimate Question”? What else, if anything, must marketers measure to drive strong financial performance?

Tags: marketing metrics, marketing measurement, net promoter, customer loyalty, marketing roi :: Add to del.icio.us