Planning and evaluating social media campaigns

by Leo Ryan and Iain MacMillan, Founders, Ryan MacMillian

The social media difference Faced by issues such as media fragmentation and device convergence, brands are hoping social media might be some form of panacea. And while they’re seeing a lot of interesting ways to interact with their audience, it’s hard to know which ones are worth pursuing. Most social media activities sit outside of the established media planning and measurement frameworks that advertising relies upon. It is clear that if brands are going to use social media they need an organised way of planning their activities and measuring their impact.

Of course, the issue is that no one quite knows what the impact of a social media activity is going to be until it is running. Not that traditional media has it any better - there’s no more of a guarantee that a TV advert will be more motivating to an audience than a blog post. However, experience gathered over many years and the acceptance of media owners’ audience estimation processes is enough to put most doubts to rest. Social media has neither of these, which creates the challenge and the opportunity – to find new ways to plan activities and measure effectiveness.

Your audience is your distribution channel

A significant difference between social media and traditional broadcast media is that, as we’re reliant on the audience for our distribution, we can’t just ‘buy’ eyeballs. Therefore, considering the balance between the interests of both the brand and audience is vital. Both parties have a strong vested interest in what is being communicated and the way it spreads - it helps to think of it as a contract or transaction, with the brand and the audience as the signatories.

KUDOS

We believe a framework for thinking is required to help us plan activities, estimate and measure results. This framework is based on five principles of good social media marketing. And significantly, each of these is important to both the brand and to the audience. In this way we make sure that the interests of each are not just represented, but become shared.

i) An activity needs to be knowledgeable; it needs to impart some of the
brand’s knowledge to an interested audience.

ii) It needs to be useful, not just to the brand but to the audience as well.

iii) It should contain an element that is desirable to both the audience and to the brand.

iv) The whole activity should be open, both literally and figuratively. The brand should be transparent about their motivations, and the audience should be able to engage and interact with the activity.

v) Finally it should be shareable. The brand should be providing something
of value to the audience, and the audience should be able to take it away
and share it with others.

These five principles can be represented by the simple acronym KUDOS:
Knowledgeable, Useful, Desirable, Open and Shareable.

Planning social media activities

KUDOS can serve as a checklist to make sure each component of your activities and tactics is knowledgeable, useful, desirable, open and shareable. These activities might vary wildly from one brief to another – from content and information to fuel conversations, to tools and services that might facilitate community action.

The KUDOS framework allows for this variance while maintaining a uniformity that makes a comparison of metrics possible.

Estimating results

During the planning stage, you can look at each of the five KUDOS elements for the proposed activity and give them a qualitative score out of five, based on benchmarks created from previous campaigns. Then use this as one of a number of factors in estimating the likely interest in an activity.

Measuring the success of the activity

The issue with social media is not finding things to measure - there’s an embarrassment of riches in terms of data - but knowing which metrics are useful and meaningful. You can use the KUDOS framework to select five attributes that allow us to track and optimise activity.

Measuring the impact and effect

What we haven’t done yet is measured the effect. The effect is difficult to measure as it occurs over a long period of time, happens in many disparate locations and can be attributed to many factors. But it’s possible to use social media to provide some indication of the effect. We can use various standard digital measurement techniques to track people who click through directly from one of our social media assets to purchase or register. However, it’s much harder to estimate how many more people might have heard about our product via the word-of-mouth our social media activity has generated, and then acted upon this information. Furthermore, traditional media uses complex (and often expensive) econometrics processes to gauge the effects of their brand building efforts – but this will be beyond the social media budgets of most clients.

In both these cases, some indication of the effect of social media activity can be found by measuring the change in the interest level around the brand or product. We do this by analysing its share of conversation online.

By looking at the volume and quality of the commentary around a brand, we are able to see the accumulative effect of all its marketing and offline activity. One should note that this is not a stand-alone measure of the change caused by social media; it is a measure of the impact as it occurs in social media. However, by drilling into this data and analysing what topics people are talking about, we may be able to attribute some of the effect.

Social media measurement – the basics

Conversation trends

Social media is all about user generated content and conversation, and there are already a vast array of tools that allow you to measure trends in conversations. This makes it easy for you to look for words or terms that are related to your campaigns such as brand and product names. Importantly, Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) lets you monitor how popular searches are across the biggest social media site in the world: Google. Nielson’s Blog Pulse (www.blogpulse.com) shows what are currently the most popular news stories, conversations and more across blogs. Whatever the form of social media, there is now a tool to help you monitor it, in fact, even Twitter has a dedicated conversation tracker (twist. flapto.com). On top of this small selection, check around for other tools to help you monitor and plan.

Get reading

The internet is all about quantitative research and number crunching… NOT! If you can identify where the most influential forums and pages with user comments are, then read them and do a bit of qualitative research. Try to identify patterns and trends in the conversations. Obviously you can’t focus too much on a minority of users, but if you start to see patterns emerging in conversations, these can be extremely useful. It obviously makes it a lot easier if you have your own forums and comment areas. Using this direct feedback is one of the best methods of researching into trends.

Website analytics

Let’s not forget the basics when it comes to measuring social media. Often your standard web analytics are going to offer the best form of measurement because you can see which sites people originate from, where they click off to and what content they are most interested in on your website. Couple this with the information you can obtain from conversation trend tools and qualitative research of forums and you can begin to build one powerful little picture of the social landscape. Site analytics tools include Site Intelligence, WebTrends, Google Analytics, NetTracker and many more.

Measuring applications and virals

Applications on the likes of Google and Facebook will all come with their own measurement packages for you to use that vary in detail. You can go the extra mile by including items such as graphics or small pixels which are hosted on your own servers to find out how many times they are downloaded. This will give you an additional insight into the amount of times one of your applications is used.

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