Social media metrics
27th May 2008, 10:32 am by Matt Rhodes
Next week I’m speaking at the SocialMediaInfluence conference in London on Measuring Influence and Audience online. It’s a tricky subject and looking around today I have been unable to find any examples of an approach which has been successfully and repeatedly applied.
The problem appears to be that whilst there are a whole range of metrics that we can measure in social media (see The Social Organisation blog for a fairly comprehensive list) but none of these truly gets to the crux of the problem. What we want to do is know is to measure the influence that a single blogger, commenter or video upload has. What is the value of a blog post praising Coca-Cola in terms that Coca-Cola could understand and measure. As many of our clients ask us, what’s the ROI of encouraging this kind of activity.
The answer is that it’s difficult to measure, not because we don’t have a range of metrics (we do) but because at the moment our understanding of what causes a particular post or a particular individual to be influential is limited. We can measure proxies, such as trackbacks, links to the site from other sites (and the number of links to the sites that link there). But these really only reflect an inherent influence that we still haven’t measured.
What we really want to know is how influential is everybody that is exposed to an piece of content, and how influential are all the people they influence. Of course calculating this number would be difficult if not impossible. And the information you need to gather would be huge. It really wouldn’t be worthwhile.
Which is why some more basic measure is needed. Take the sites like Dell’s Ideastorm and MyStarbucksIdea. These get peers to vote posts up or down depending how relevant they think they are. You can then migrate only the more popular posts to the front page or the top of the list. This kind of rough approach might be a crowd-sourced way of measuring influence. We know that the most popular posts are those that people in the community think the brand needs to listen to most. Perhaps this is the only measure of influence we need.
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David Alston:
Hi Matt,
Great post. This is certainly a hot topic lately. At Radian6 we calculate the most influential sites/entities for a user-defined topic based on a weighted score controlled by the user. The elements that go into the scoring include total comments, total unique commenters, average engagement (which we calculate per post), and total on-topic inbound links. Our platform monitors all types of social media including blogs, forums, opinion sites, top video and image sharing sites, and emerging media like Twitter. We pull all of the conversations splintered across the spectrum into one system for review and real-time analysis. Our influencer calculation is a living and breathing scoring system as the dynamics of each on-topic post are constantly updated (as we return to the posts found on the topic and continue to recount the metrics). The user has the ability to adjust the weightings based on the makeup of the audience typically found within a topic. We also allow you to drill down into each influencer to understand who linked to them (on-topic) and who they linked out to – which would give you an idea of the sphere of influence.
Let me know if you are interest in seeing how the platform works. We’d love your feedback.
Cheers.
David Alston
Radian6
ps. Here’s a link that will give you a view of what others are saying about the platform currently on Twitter – http://tinyurl.com/3w55hq
27 May 2008, 1:11 pmMatt:
Hey Dave,
Thanks for the comment. We’re really interested in social media measuring here. It’s an area that’s developing quickly at the moment. Would be great to see your platform, especially before the conference I’m speaking at next week.
Matt
27 May 2008, 5:36 pmDavid Alston:
Hey there Matt,
Would love to have you see a demo. I tried to find a way to email/DM you but no luck. Please kick me off and email attached to this comment and I’ll get something set up right away.
Cheers.
David
29 May 2008, 11:15 pmDavid Alston:
In case you don’t have access to the email on the comment my address is david [at} radian6.com
Cheers.
David
29 May 2008, 11:16 pm