Simple and Focused: Jim Sterne’s Social Media Metrics
How refreshing to come to the end of a book on a deep topic and feel like I have a number of actionable take-aways. Jim Sterne is a founding father of Internet Marketing and his wisdom comes through in his latest book loud and clear.
"Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment" (2010 published by John Wiley & Sons) lays out a solid strategic framework that covers all the Social Media bases. He makes generous use of the thinking from other thought leaders and their blogs, tweets and reports. As a result, its not a bad way to get an insider's tour of the technorati of the Social Media Marketing tribe.
Here are the kinds of takeaways you can expect, with a sample from each of the book's nine chapters.
Chapter 1: Getting Focused. With a focus on the big three (increased revenue, lower cost and improved customer satisfaction), Sterne leads you through the kinds of questions you need to ask to make your goals truly useful to your business. With his tongue-in-cheek example of analysis around the question "Are fat people lazy?" , he shows how discipline and being crystal clear is critical to useful analysis.
Chapter 2: Getting Attention - Reaching Your Audience. This is where Jim Sterne's years of experience as a sales and marketing pro really shine. He marries the importance of brand recognition with the world of Social Media reach metrics. Using models from a couple of industry leaders (Avinash Kaisuik, Charlene Li and Jason Stamper) he outlines some ways in which you can measure the effectiveness of your reach across blogs, Twitter and Facebook Apps. The chapter wraps with a cautionary tale of why the numbers from different tools don't usually match up. Learn to live with it.
Chapter 3. Getting Respect - Identifying Influence. How valuable are your followers? Sterne dives into a discussion of the different kinds of influencers in your Social Network and how they drive conversations. This is a great chapter to unpack questions about authority, impact and empty metrics.
Chapter 4. Getting Emotional - Recognizing Sentiment. As a student of Artificial Intelligence in the 80's, this was a particularly interesting chapter to me. Sentiment Analysis represents the leading edge of Social Media analytics, but is also fraught with the same challenges AI systems have suffered from for decades. Sterne surveys the latest and greatest thinking in this space and explains the pitfalls of having computers decipher the Tweets:
"My crab cakes were bad" from "Skied moguls all morning. That mountain is BAD!"
Chapter 5. Getting Response - Triggering Action. Some very helpful thinking around getting responses that cover Social Bookmarking and the Engagement Food-chain model lead us to understanding of whether our Social Media efforts are generating productive activity.
Chapter 6. Getting the Message - Hearing the Conversation. Sterne tackles the nature of the conversations taking place about your industry and your brand. Ratings, reviews and recommendations - and the tools that track them are covered here. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is becoming an industry standard in measuring customer satisfaction for its ability to predict future company success. Sterne integrates the NPS gracefully into this chapter on listening through Social Media.
Chapter 7. Getting Results - Driving Business Outcomes. Finally, we come to business outcomes and Key Performance Indicators. Tying everything he's covered back to the goals discussed in Chapter 1, Sterne tackles the challenging topic of Social Media ROI (Sterne's short answer to this industry hot potato - Yes, you can measure ROI!). Again, some wonderful frameworks are shared from industry experts including Lithium's model for measuring community health. Good stuff.
Chapter 8. Getting Buy-In - Convincing Your Colleagues. How do you get Social Media accepted in your organization? Sterne dons the cape of the Change Agent and gives us a six step process, complete with a typology of managers we'll have to navigate to get our Social Media initiative recognized.
Chapter 9. Getting Ahead - Seeing the Future. A perfect wrap to the book ends with a view towards where this might all be heading. From patented mind-reading technologies to the Cluetrain-driven shift from business-focus to the consumer-focus, this chapter had me scrambling for my closest search engine to learn more.
To be sure, Social Media is an exploding arena which our businesses and cultures need to examine and understand more fully. We need a discussion about tribal marketing and connecting to audiences, we need conversations about good conversations and we need to keep our hearts open to generational differences within Social Media. However, Social Media Metrics fills an important gap in our understanding of how to operationalize Social Media and begin working it into our daily business.
Have you read this book? If so, I'd love to hear your impressions in our comment section below. Please share any other Social Media business books that you think people could benefit from.
Book Chapter Summary of Social Media Analytics from Web Analytics 2.0
Avinash Kaushik has written the book on Web Analytics (two actually). His most recent book is called Web Analytics 2.0. Its worth reading the whole thing but, given our focus on tribe-building, I wanted to give a summary of the chapter on Social Web Analytics.
BTW - please buy the Web Analytics 2.0 book if you have an interest in this topic. Avinash is donating 100% of his income from this book to charity. I would like to commend Avinash on this generous action and the oustanding challenge he provides to all of us to consider how we can pay it forward. 
The chapter on Social Media Metrics is called “Emerging Analytics: Social, Mobile, and Video”
In the first few pages, he provides an overview of how analytics have been impacted by the Social Web. User Generated Content and off-site conversations are an essential part of our online brand experience. He advocates that we need to think more about “Conversation Rate” than “Conversion Rate”.
Avinash dives deep into the options for tracking analytics. He starts with Mobile analytics and describes the challenges of determining if your blog or content is being consumed on a mobile device. He uses a tagging solution from PercentMobile in his blog, but mentions Bongo Analytics and Mobilytics as options. This lets him track the amount of mobile traffic, devices used, networks, countries and mobile via WIFI. He points out that the world of measuring mobile is just getting started, but will be crucial if we are going to segment our data and understand what is happening properly.
Blog Analytics are tackled next. Avinash advocates two metrics to measure “Raw Author Contribution”: posts per month and average words per post. From there, he focuses on “Holistic Audience Growth” and discusses how you should use a measure of RSS subscribers to see how your blog is growing. Reach will measure how often your content is accessed and “Conversation Rate” for blogs is measured by # of Visitor comments / # of posts. He goes on to discuss the use of Technorati and Tweet Citations to measure your ripple effect.
Finally, he treats the cost of blogging by examining the expenses of Technology, Time and Opportunity Cost. From there he examines the metrics of value including Comparative Value (blog valuation tools), Direct Value (monetizing through ads and affiliates), Nontraditional Value (savings on PR, offline ads) and Unquantifiable Value. These factors can, arguably, be used to compute ROI for your blogging efforts.
With Twitter, he starts off with the basic tracking of growth in the number of followers and churn rate. He then moves to “message amplification” in which the world of retweets is handled. Pointing to tools like TwitterCounter, Retweetist and Retweetrank, he suggests that you find out which tweets are most effective with your audience.
Beyond these initial metrics, he starts to examine click-through rates for Conversion Rate and Twitterfriends for measuring Conversation Rate. He wraps this section with a discussion of emerging Twitter Metrics including Engagement, Reach, Velocity, Demand, Network Strength and Activity.
The last section of this chapter tackles Video analytics. While embedding tracking codes into player-specific modules is the way to get the most granularity, it is also IT-intensive. He spends some time looking at YouTube Insights to provide metrics on any videos you place in your YouTube channel. You can discover your top videos, regional data and attention throughout a given video. [NOTE: - I discovered that this only works with videos that have a relatively high number of visits – in the thousands.] This can help you identify which parts of your videos are most appealing to viewers. You can also determine where your video has been embedded to measure the “viralness” of a video.
He wraps up the chapter by discussing the need to compute “Contextual Influence” or rather, the value of each feature relative to others. Kaiushik is a big advocate of capturing “Voice of the Customer” to determine exactly why people are coming to and using your web site and other properties. His answer to this problem is simple. Ask them. He advocates a tool called 4Q for on-site surveys. You can also run A/B or multivariate tests to determine the preferences for certain material.
The chapter is filled with technical details, tools to support your analysis and insights into how you can take actionable steps in response to your collected data.
I hope that is a helpful overview that will allow you to decide whether this book might be helpful to your Social Media Analytics efforts. Avinash tackles the topic of Social Media Metrics in his own blog in a lot more detail.
Have you implemented any Social Media metrics for your company? Which ones are most helpful? Please continue the conversation by commenting below.
