FreshNetworks Blog

Last week I attended an event on social media measurement and ROI as part of Social Media Week London. There were a lot of issues flying about such as ‘the meaning of ROI’, ‘campaign objectives or strategic objectives’. And some interesting perspectives from the panel on all of these topics and some discussions with the crowd. However one of the more important points discussed  was the use and relevance of objective setting. It was refreshing to take a step back and remember that with all this emphasis on objectives and direct results that we don’t forget that engaging in social media will usually help in ways that you never intended and objective setting can sometimes narrow your focus.

I have personally been working on evaluating some of our 2009 social media engagements, showing how this engagement met the initial objectives that were laid out as the foundations for undertaking the projects. After sifting through a lot of analytics, community data, and online buzz monitoring there were some really good results. The nicer part of this however was looking at some of the data and seeing the impact that a campaign had, that you would never have intended or expected it to.

A community that we have recently launched was set up with a view to strengthen the brand among a younger target audience, become an authority in its category and drive insight through the business. The campaign is doing very well in meeting these objectives, but we have also noticed that we have driven a lot of questions from people abroad and have been able to help international customers feel closer to the business and given them the ability to ask questions that they are restricted in asking due to the lack of stores in their country.

This is one of many examples that I have come across of social media adding value to a business that was never originally forecast or planned. I agree strongly that to make engagement a success and not open your company up to unwanted activity then you have to have clear objectives but make sure that your measurement is not as focussed as your objectives because you will miss out on value that you never intended.

The last post of our guide to Getting Started in Social Media looked at measurements and how brands should be ruthless about ROI. This presentation from Oliver Blanchard is a great introduction to social media ROI and how you should conceive of it and then measure it. It’s also quite amusing in parts and so is Required Reading this week at FreshNetworks

For me the most insightful part of the presentation is the distinction between a non-financial ROI and a financial one. Blanchard’s model is that you get the non-financial ROI before you get measurable financial return. They are part of a continuum – your investment leads to something that will have a non-financial impact first and then a financial one. This is a model that really rings true in our experience of building online communities. Financial ROI can take time to achieve, but good planning and strategy should start to give you non-financial ROI relatively quickly. Brands often need to have this trajectory reinforced – just because you don’t have any hard financial return yet does not mean it isn’t just round the corner. It probably is if you persist with your efforts.

Over the last ten days we have shared our thoughts on four steps any brand should do when they are getting started in social media. The aim is to give any brand who is looking to use social media (or indeed to use it better) a framework to work through, some ideas and also a lot of questions and decisions that will need to be made. As I say in a recent article in the Independent: “The biggest mistakes companies make, are implementing a tool-based, as opposed to people-based, strategy”.

The four posts in the guide are below. Many of these posts raise as many questions as they offer answers and getting your use of social media right is not easy. But they should provide a useful framework for any brand looking to get started in social media. And if you need some help with this you can always give us a call!

The FreshNetworks Guide to Getting Started in Social Media

• Part One:  Do you know what people are saying about you? Buzz tracking, social media monitoring, the power of understanding who is talking about you where and why, and some great free tools for any brand to use
• Part Two: What do you want to achieve? Working out your brand’s aims and objectives (and making these measurable) is the single most important factor in a successful social media strategy. Do this before you think about technology.
• Part Three: Have a go and experiment with social media Once you have clear objectives that are measurable it’s time to get going. Try things out and experiment, but make sure you do them where you know you will have the greatest chance of achieving these aims and engaging the people you want to engage.
• Part Four: Track and evaluate the success you are having When you are using social media tools it is essential that you are measuring and tracking your performance against these aims. Measurement is critical and assessing the benefit you are having will help you to refine and improve your strategy overall.

For any brand getting started in social media, the most important thing is to be able to show the impact you are having. To be able to evaluate and assess what is working and what isn’t having the results that you might expect. To show the return on investment that your efforts are having and how this compares to other methods.

There is a lot of talk about social media measurement and it is true that in isolation it is difficult to know where to start. But for businesses with a clear social media strategy, it is actually much easier than many people think. We stressed earlier in this guide to Getting Started in Social Media the importance of thinking about the reasons you are using social media before you jump in to use any tools or to engage people. We talked though a process to define clear and measurable business objectives and aims for your use of social media. It is important that you make these both clear and measurable. Typical objectives that a brand might consider include – acquisition of new customers, retention of existing ones, number of new insights or ideas into the business, or number of customer problems solved. These are just some of the objectives that brands may have for using online communities and social media, and all of them are measurable. At the simplest level they either save money for a brand or they generate revenue.

In the online communities that we manage at FreshNetworks a lot of time is spent defining the objectives and then working out first what metrics should be measured against these, and then monitoring and reporting on these to make sure we understand how the community is performing. It is important to establish a set of metrics that you can measure to assess how you are performing against your aims. In many cases you will want to measure a mix of things for each aim, but overall you should be able to show and prove what impact you are having.

Example: If you want to use social media as an efficient way of resolving customer queries, for example, you probably want to measure the number of unique customer problems you have on the site, the number of problems that are solved by other members of the community. You can then put an equivalent cost that it would have taken to service these queries through other channels and measure the actual reduction in, for example, call centre costs that you witness over time. This is what Dell did, and this is how Dell managed to work out that one member of its customer support community saved them $1m a year in support costs. That’s real ROI.

So the final stage to getting started in social media is to make sure you are ruthless about measuring what you are doing. It’s the only way you will know what works (and what doesn’t) and prove the impact you are having with social media. To do this you need to have clear objectives and these need to be measurable. Then you can measure the actual impact you are having on business aims. The actual benefit your social media strategy is bringing to your brand.

You can read the full guide here: Getting Started in Social Media

I’ve loved putting together a series on debunking community management as part of FreshNetwork’s commitment to promoting best practice and sharing knowledge. The hardest part, of course, was boiling such a huge subject down into just five blogs. And they ended up behemoths…

So to help any time-poor, interest-rich readers out there, here is a summary of the key points from the series:

Introduction to community management

The what, who and why of community management. It’s a strange job to explain, and a challenge to do well. The way you splice your day depends largely on the community set-up, size and specific-goals, but there are general rules that cross all communities.

• Respect your members
• Retain good, safe boundaries and rules
• Be fair
• Don’t allow yourself to appear provoked (even when a member is driving you potty)
• Listen to the group, and the individuals within it
• Balance the needs of the individual with the needs of the group
• Keep records of everything

Read the full blog post

Champions, active users and trolls

We looked at who is using your community and how they are using it. The 90-9-1 principle has been a trusted favourite of community people for over a decade, but it’s looking increasingly dusty as new forms of micro-activity (such as rating, thumbs ups etc) come in and blur the edges between readers and editors.

We talked about that precious core of users that behave wonderfully, use the features, have the community’s best interests at heart and help keep it thriving and healthy: community champions. But what really came across in the comments is how not to underestimate the ‘lurkers’, as they are hugely important to the success of your community – especially if the number of page views is a KPI for your site.

Respect your ‘readers’ as well as your top contributors!

The toxic team, bores and trolls also got an airing. As delightful as it would be, it’s nigh on impossible to bring together a group of people without at least a handful of them behaving in a way you find aggressive, unpleasant or just really annoying…

Read the full blog post

Growth of a community

So you’ve got your community, now what? How do you know if it’s healthy? In fact, what do you consider to be a healthy community? If one of the core aims of your community is a vibrant and colourful debating space, the number of posts and replies plus the subjects being debated will be far more important than the number of overall members, for example.

How do you judge the health of your community, what should you measure? We talked about the importance of thinking about this way before you build anything. It should be central to your plans and your ongoing strategy.

But now you have your community, how to keep it vibrant, how do you recruit new members. Do you even want to actively recruit new members? Is it more important to you to increase engagement with the members you currently have?

We drew some top-line hints:

• Think open questions, talking points
• Keep it simple
• There’s more to engagement than posts
• Trust your own interests and be authentic
• Careful with current affairs

Read the full blog post

Moderation and safety

What are the risks to your company or name, health and happiness? How can you spot risks, and help eradicate them? What are the options for moderation, and the potential drawbacks of each type? You pre-moderate all content, and be sure of the quality of everything you let through, but this will create a very different (almost certainly slower and lesser used) beast to a post-moderated community, which in turn will behave differently to a reactively-moderated community where more of the control and responsibility is shared with the members.

The right moderation entirely depends on the community and its context, so we pulled together some thinking points to help your decision-making:

• Who is the community aimed at?
• Is it particularly at risk of malicious posting?
• Does your membership feel comfortable with self-regulation?
• Do you have the resources to pre-moderate quickly enough or will messages take too long to go live?
• Is the subject matter particularly legally-sensitive?
• Are children or vulnerable people going to be using it?
• Is there a high chance of defamation e.g. a celeb gossip community?
• How much control do you need rather than want?

But what about when the community doesn’t police itself very well, or show the restraint necessary to stay out of trouble?

In 2007, Mumsnet.com, an online community started and managed by a group of mums in North London, paid author Gina Ford a five-figure sum to settle a libel claim.

Gina Ford, a well-known figure in the baby book market, advocates strict, routine-based methods that some members of the Mumsnet community took exception to and allegedly defamatory comments were posted.

A legal fight ensued, with Justine Roberts, Mumsnet’s founder telling the press the site’s 15,000 daily comments were “impossible to monitor unless you have eyes and ears everywhere”.

Read the full blog post

Community metrics

Metrics are vital. Understanding the who, what, where, why and how many of your online community is vital. Understanding if you’re doing your company some good (or bad), is vital. Setting KPIs is vital and knowing whether you’re hitting them, is vital. Metrics are vital.

But which metrics are vital to you and your community? And how do you learn from these and share them with the wider organisation?

We spoke to various community managers, all of whom had a different favourite metric. And we also introduced some thinking about newsletters and external communications. In many ways, we argued, this is a more fragile relationship:

Mainly because unlike communicating within your community, where members have chosen to come to the space you have provided, here you are pushing your content into their domain. Their private space.

If you do it badly, intrusively, it could result not just in an unsubscribe from the mailing list, but a reaction on or an exodus from the community.

Put simply: You need to be as certain as possible how best to use newsletters. You need to know what works. And what doesn’t.

You need to measure everything that you do and be able to learn from it, because if you don’t, the health of your community is on the line.

Read the full blog post

Image by ToniVC via Flickr

I’ve read a few posts and articles this week discussing a report from showing that Facebook users spend more time on site than Twitter’s. These articles make the assumption that increased time-on-site is a good thing; that it is a sign of greater engagement and involvement with the site.

It is certainly true for social networks that there are significant benefits to be gained from increasing time-on-site. Perhaps not for the immediate benefits of greater engagement, but more because it is a sign of the increasingly important role that any particular social network is playing in a user’s life. We’ve written in the past how Facebook’s valuation is possibly related to a shift in our use of the internet to put social networks at the heart of a user’s experience. And in this context, time on site is important.

But in an online community, where we are interested in shared ideas and experience rather than share of time online, is time-on-site a useful measure of engagement?

As a health measure, we use time-on-site a lot at FreshNetworks, it is useful to measure and monitor over time and together with other health measures (such as number of unique users, depth of visit and frequency of visit). But a greater time-on-site does not, in itself, mean a better online community. We are more interested in the share of ideas than the share of time online. We want people to join, benefit from and, if they wish, add to the debates and conversations in the community. We want their contributions, even if they only spend a small amount of time on the site itself. Online communities are about shared ideas and interests – we want people who add to them.

So time-on-site is a useful health measure, but it does not necessarily determine the success of your online community. That’s why we think that the success of your online community should be tied to specific business objectives, and not to relatively arbitrary measures such as time-on-site and unique visitors. We have very successful online communities with only a hundred members, and very successful ones where people visit less often or for less time. It’s about establishing your business objectives and then working to maximise your share of ideas and share of insight. Not fighting to get more time spent on your site if that time is not productive or helping you reach your aims.

Some more reading

• Metrics and intuition (thisisherd.com)
• Forget Social Media Measurement. Get Back to the Basics. (kylelacy.com)
• ROI-Return On Influence (directmarketingobservations.com)

Our post a few days ago on measurement and ROI in social media, Social Media ROI: Measuring the unmeasurable, prompted a fair amount of discussion. The main thrust of the post, and of the presentation it highlights, is that in order to measure ROI in social media, you need to have a clear and reasoned understanding of what it is you’re measuring and why.

When building ROI models for online communities at FreshNetworks, we follow an approach that includes the following four steps

• Identify what success looks like in the online community
• List the success metrics you can measure
• Ignore things that might be a distraction
• Track and measure your success metrics ruthlessly

It isn’t rocket science, and social media ROI really shouldn’t be. The tricky part of the process isn’t measuring and tracking the metrics, but identifying what they should be in the first place. This is the stage that needs time and focused effort. But in some cases a very clear success metric can be identified.

One such case is of social media activity as a fundraising tool for not-for-profits. Here the measure of success if usually the cost effectiveness of the fundraising – they want to raise as much money as possible using as little resource as possible. And they are in a great position to compare the cost and effectiveness of a number of different methods.

One great resource for those in this industry is frogloop’s Social Network ROI Calculator. This is a fantastic resource that calculates in a degree of some accuracy the ROI that not-for-profits can get from social media campaigns. As frogloop say about the calculator:

You can use this tool to calculate an estimate of cost and return on investment for the recruitment and fundraising efforts of your staff in social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. It works sort of like an online mortgage calculator. Just enter the starting assumptions in the yellow boxes below and the tool calculates results automatically.

The tool does require a lot of information but it is a comprehensive tool that delivers real and analysable ROI data for not-for-profit social media campaigns. Taking staff costs and a range of data on email acquisition rates, average donations and activities in social networks, it can calculate in quite some depth what the ROI story might be.

Go to the ROI calculator for social network campaigns

Of course, the problem with complicated models like this is that they are suited only to certain circumstances. This calculator would not be appropriate for all not-for-profit campaigns, but where it is it’s a great resource.

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Some more reading

• Social media is here to stay… Now what? (vator.tv)
• Recession resistant: 95% of social media marketers will maintain or increase social media spending (socialmediatoday.com)
• Marketing on the Web: How to Profit From Social Networking (jonggunlee.tistory.com)

Image via Wikipedia

On Friday we posted about an experiment running on one of our online communities, comparing paid and organic search strategies. This is just one of the ways that our clients measure the ROI of their online community – by increased traffic from organic search or significant savings on their paid search bills.

Measuring ROI is an important topic in social media, all the communities that we build at FreshNetworks have very clear ROI cases. We spend time during the planning and strategy phases working on the objectives of the online community and how we can measure this. This may be increased sales, a specific number of new ideas generated for the business, increased retention rate, traffic to an ecommerce platform, savings in market and consumer research spending… The areas where online communities can contribute to business objectives can be vast and depend on the specific needs of the business. Time spent working on this is time well spent.

That’s why this week’s Required Reading is a great presentation on Social Media ROI from Egg Co. I particularly like the way that they break down an ROI measure into a Success Metric and then into a Goal. This is very similar to the way we work with clients at FreshNetworks, and the examples in the presentation show how this approach to ROI can show the real impact social media can have.

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Some more reading

• Social media is here to stay… Now what? (vator.tv)
• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009 (freshnetworks.com)
• Should We Even Consider ROI in Social Media? (kylelacy.com)
• 10 practical questions about Social Media (webnomena.com)
• What is the value of listening to social media channels for your organization? (beth.typepad.com)
• Is 2009 the year of social media & return on investment? (socialmediatoday.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Three months ago we started a small experiment with one of our online communities at FreshNetworks. The site had been in seeding phase for about 10 weeks and was starting to get some activity and some real traction, there were loyal members and real conversations starting to grow. At this stage we wanted to grow the number of members and also to grow the quality of the contributions to the site. There are a number of ways you can do this, but one of the real benefits of online communities is the ability to drive natural, organic, search. We wanted to test this and to start to build an ROI model for brands.

We decided to put paid and organic search head-to-head. To devote a modest sum to Google AdWords and also to monitor the organic search on the site. We didn’t spend any more time than usual optimising the content on the site, with the community manager working to organise content and correct spelling but not to make sure that user-generated content was keyword-rich. We wanted to do a real test – putting real organic search against paid search.The experiment is to run for six months and we are now halfway through this.

My hypothesis was that organic search would take time to grow and that at the three-month stage we would still be seeing significantly better results for paid search – higher traffic, more conversions to signing up, greater loyalty and deeper, longer visits. Then during the second three months of the experiment I’d expect organic search to really take the lead and over the six months this to be the clear winner.

Things never work out quite like you expect them to. And in this case they are actually much more interesting.

We’re going to be working on this experiment for another three months so we don’t want to reveal too many details, but initial results are, in part, as expected, but in other areas really not:

• More visits to the online community come from paid search than from organic search (although if we take just the last month then this is reversed). In total about 1.5 times as many visits came from paid search as from organic search in the last three months
• But, those coming from organic search are more likely to sign-up to become members of the community. The difference is marginal at the moment, but there is a clear trend to higher conversion rates for organic search visits
• Those coming from organic search are spending much more time on the site and visiting many more pages per visit. In fact time on site is almost three times as long for organic search as paid search, and they visit almost twice as many pages per visit
• Finally, those users that first came to the site by organic search are more likely to become active Members of the online community.

So the results are not quite what I expected, but a clear trend is developing. Whilst paid search delivers more search traffic (although this balance is changing) the quality of organic search is significantly better. Traffic to the site is important, but in an online community people signing-up, spending time on the community and actively contributing is much more interesting. For this, organic search seems to be significantly better.

Stay tuned for the final results of the experiment in three months time when we should be able to show the real power of organic search. These initial results are exciting.

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Some more reading

• Three fremium strategies (vator.tv)
• What Sweet Search has to say about the future of SEO (tynansanger.com)
• PPC Myths (seodoz.com)

A new report out this week suggests that the biggest hindrance in the adoption of social media is a lack of knowledge. The statistics, from MarketingSherpa, look at the barriers that organisations cite as having stopped them from adopting social media marketing techniques in their firm.

Of the 1,886 firms interviewed who had not embraced social media as a marketing tool, 46% cited a lack of knowledgeable staff as being a significant reason for this. The second most popular response was an inability to measure ROI, with 43% of firms claiming that this was preventing them from adopting social media marketing.

That these two reasons are cited by firms are not a surprise to us at FreshNetworks. We know that clients sometimes need support getting up to speed with the latest changes and developments in social media and how it can help marketing. This isn’t surprising. Things are changing quickly in social media, as we’ve seen in the UK over the last two weeks where a number of popular TV and radio figures have started using Twitter as a part of their shows, thus propelling it into the mainstream. It can be difficult for firms who are busy focusing on their own plans, products and direction to step back and take in the changes as they are happening. Even more so in the current economic climate.

ROI is also a serious issue for marketers, again even more so now when they need to maximise the impact of every piece of spending. There is a lot of discussion of measurement in social media. At one end of the spectrum are people who think that measuring web traffic and statistics gives you a real insight into what people are doing in social media. At the other end are those who think that a firm should be more business-focused, establish a set of objectives for their use of social media and then measure against these. We tend to think that a mix of the two is the best solution. No business should embark on a social media marketing plan without some very clear business objectives in mind. One of our clients wants to increase repeat purchase, for example; another wants to create a target number of new ideas for their product team. Alongside these business objectives are a set of community measures and metrics that make sure we’re on track to achieve what we want.

So, it’s not a surprise that lack of knowledge and lack of clarity of ROI are the two biggest stumbling blocks for firms embarking on social media marketing. But they really shouldn’t be.

And if you’re one of these firms that’s thinking about adopting social media marketing, we’re here to help. We’ve got a wealth of articles, reading, case studies and posts on both topics so take a look and see if we can help.

• Worried you don’t know enough about social media? Check out our articles on social media and online communities. You might also like our Social Media Beginners series and our regular Social Media Diary.
• Not sure about ROI? Our Social Media Diary will probably help too. As might our posts on measurement and ROI.

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Some more reading

• What Now? Build Your Brand. (altitudebranding.com)
• Stop Talking, Start Doing (mediabullseye.com)
• 4 of 10 Social Media Commandments: Quality to Preference (kylelacy.com)
• Some reasons for optimism (oxyfish.com)
• Business media: trends for 2009 (businessmedia.co.uk)