The Social Portfolio Problem

Externally, social media is not a department. It is not a group or a team. It is a cross cutting evolution of an organization’s engagement with its constituents. For large companies this drives enormous complexity. There are hundreds of brands that need a voice. There are dozens of operating geographies that must deal with the cultural nuances of their region. There are many operating divisions and internal groups with independent priorities and initiatives. All of these groups, and often the combinatorial explosion of the intersections between each are establishing a presence in social media. And each of these is managing its own set of social accounts on a variety of platforms usually with a distinct team at the helm, executing in relative isolation.

This distributed, decentralized complexity breeds significant problems and opportunities. How do you share policies and procedures when it is unclear who is participating in social media? How do you cross pollinate best practices and innovation that rises up from the genetic diversity offered by mostly autonomous execution? When crisis hits, how do you quickly identify and coordinate the individuals that need to be on message with a response?

Social Portfolio Insight

In response to the challenges and opportunities we have seen, Dachis Group is announcing the public beta release of our Social Portfolio Insight product. Social Portfolio Insight offers organizations a solution to the complexity and dynamism inherent in managing and coordinating a distributed portfolio of social accounts.

Maintaining an Comprehensive Social Directory

Built on top of our Social Business Intelligence as a Service big data analytics platform, Social Portfolio Insight takes advantage of the platforms detection and crowdsourced certification of company owned social accounts. Social Portfolio Insight opens up that always updating list of accounts, as well as the rich metadata surrounding each to the company who owns the accounts. It couples this with a productivity UI that allows the company to augment and manage this directory via bulk uploading and visual organization tools. The maintenance of this list is distributed throughout an organization through a lightweight social network of social media strategists and practitioners across the organization.

Understanding the Social Portfolio

Social Portfolio Insight provides a unique application which lets a company analyze their social presence through the lens of platform, owners, geographies, departments. The platform also provides at a glance insight into audience and conversation health, quickly identifying hotspots globally. Finally, it also provides high level benchmarking capabilities allowing an organization to analyze its platform, brand, and region coverage compared to industry averages. Of course, all of this information can be exported for further analysis and reporting.

Collaboration

Social Portfolio Insight also contains a lightweight collaboration layer that enables an organization to pinpoint a class of social practitioner and then message them. For example, if a crisis erupts in a specific country, those who contribute to that country’s social presence can be immediately identified and talking points disseminated.

Help Us Make This Better

Social Portfolio Insight is available as a free beta to anyone who is currently registered for the Social Business Index. Simply log in to your Index account, click to profile on the main navigation and follow the beta sign up instructions in the upper right. We would love to hear your feedback and comments. You can reach us at socialbusinessindex@dachisgroup.com, @dachisgroup, or by contacting to any Dachis Group employee.

The noise out there can be infuriating. Too much clutter; no sense of what goes with what; what’s a “need to know” vs. a “nice to know” vs. a “never wanted to know.”

I often find myself talking clients off the ledge as they attempt to prioritize social media efforts, given inexplicable differences in results across listening platforms, varying calculations of influence, and the age-old question of “what’s good” when it comes to buzz and sentiment. Further, knowing ‘how well’ you’re doing in social media has only become more problematic with the increasing shift in interest from amassing eyeballs to mobilizing and rewarding them.

As an industry, we’re plagued by inefficient categorizations, unstable rankings of  authority, and unpredictable, black box algorithms guessing what matters most.

Perhaps as a result, we see more organizations shifting in the same way that we, as people, do as we go through adolescence–  from giving disproportionate weight to what others say about us, to being more  concerned with our own actions. That which we can control.

Being in control of our actions requires a different type of measurement and management. To help organizations in said efforts, we’re  announcing today our public launch of the Social Business Index (SBI),  the first application on our Social Business Intelligence as a Service  (SBIaaS) data services platform.

Having worked in social media analysis for seven years, it’s become  clear to me, the trick to finding meaning in social media is to be intimate with your dataset (for context), and to monitor relative comparisons to yield meaning. We’ve thoroughly taken this to heart with  the SBI.

Our dataset includes the social accounts of thousands of companies, their subsidiaries, and brands, in addition to the social accounts of their engaged market (e.g. anyone who interacts with a given account). Using natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, powered by our own strategists, we identify specific activities that are being executed by a given brand — emanating from their social accounts. This is a critical distinction from the way things are being measured today. We’re not exclusively monitoring reactions, or buzz in response to a real or perceived tactic. Instead, we’re starting with the action per se. We’re measuring what you, as marketers, are doing– in addition to the way your market responds.

We’ve captured specific behaviors correlated with outcomes such as Brand Awareness, Brand Love, Brand Mindshare, and Advocacy.  In aggregate, this gives us a company’s Social Business Index Score– a ranking, analysis, and benchmarking of Social Business adoption and performance.

Go to socialbusinessindex.com, learn more, and sign up.

We’re excited about our progress in digging out of the black hole of social media measurement. We acknowledge our approach will evolve over time and we look forward to your collaboration to do so. If you work at a company covered by the index, register for private access to deeper analytics.  If your company is not currently covered, request coverage.

If you’re just curious, take a look at our ranking and best in class analysis by browsing at www.socialbusinessindex.com.

The Brand Marketing Context

At the macro level, we see the beginnings of an inevitable shift in brand marketing spend towards social.  While there are many reasons for this (several of which have been the subject of other blog posts at Dachis Group), there is one factor that is of particular interest in motivating the creation of the Social Business Index and the underlying Social Business Intelligence as a Service (SBIaaS) platform on which the Index is built.

Social, as a conduit to connect with a brand’s market, is on the brink of offering a unique environment to measure the return on investment of marketing activities, particularly for the murkier business outcomes of brand marketing such as brand awareness, brand love, mindshare, and advocacy.  There are a few factors that are driving this.  First, social has now hit a scale of adoption to provide meaningful audiences for brand engagement as witnessed by Facebook blowing past the 750M user mark this year (for context, the typical superbowl commercial is viewed by 111M).  Further, the volume of public conversation in social is staggering (remember Twitter engineering’s casual “350B tweets delivered daily” disclosure).

The treasure trove of social data and potential insight is ripe for analysis to understand the impact and value of a particular activity.  That insight can be immediately acted on to optimize the strategies of a brand because of the unique nature of social’s authentic, two way communication with the market.  Not only does this provide the potential for superior marketing results, but creates the opportunity to test many messages with many segments and measure them individually (in a way, similar to the unique A/B testing of performance marketings simpler marketing activities).

The Challenges of Measuring Social ROI

There are a couple of significant hurdles that must be overcome to capitalize on social’s opportunity to be a marketing vehicle with clearly measurable performance.

First, there needs to be traceability of the behaviors and activities executed by a brand in social to the business outcomes that they are trying to achieve.  Second, a marketer needs context to understand where their execution of a marketing behavior is on the spectrum of performance between best and worst in class for their industry (or competitors).  The latter provides the marketer with the canvas of what is possible and sets expectations for expected results.  The former provides the tools to measure their performance within the context of what is possible and expected.  The combination of the two allows the marketer to optimize marketing spend and confidently plan.  If Coca Cola, Starbucks, or Red Bull want to add another million Facebook fans, there are many ways they could be successful.  If a Chinese mining company wants to do the same, their options are…more limited.

Dachis Group and Social Business Intelligence

The Dachis Group SBIaaS data services platform was created to solve these two core problems and that is reflected in the Social Business Index, the first lens on top of the data produced by the platform.  The Social Business Index measures social performance and adoption of the world’s leading social businesses.  It provides a stack ranking of these companies as well as a best in class and industry rankings.

Currently we are tracking thousands of companies, their subsidiaries, and their brands. We monitor their social accounts, as well as the social accounts of their engaged market (over 100M total, and tens of millions active at any given time). This coverage increases daily.  Using natural language processing and machine learning algorithms powered by our industry defining Social Business Design framework and the world’s largest Social Business strategy consultancy, we identify specific behaviors and activities that are being executed by those brands.  We use the execution of those behaviors and associated measures to construct metrics which correlate to brand marketing business outcomes.  We’ve started with Brand Awareness, Brand Love, Brand Mindshare, and Advocacy.  We then benchmark the execution of those measures, metrics, and behaviors against each companies competitors, their industry, best in class, and the market in general.  In aggregate, this gives us a company’s Social Business Index Score and is the basis of the rankings in the index.

The ability to provide that traceability from behavior to business outcome coupled with comprehensive benchmarking overcomes the two hurdles to measuring performance of marketing in social.  This is the beginning.  We will learn.  We will evolve our approach.  We know things aren’t perfect, but are excited to be at the forefront of this new and interesting world of Social Business Intelligence.  We look forward to learning from all of you and participating in the dialog around uncovering insight in social data, making that data actionable, and then measuring the performance of those actions.

Community dashboards are not unlike treadmill dashboards.  Both provide metrics as indicators of health.  The treadmill provides this with heart rate and calories burned.  The community platform provides this with number of active members, content contributors, etc. Dashboard metrics don’t lie, but they don’t tell the whole story. The treadmill does not factor calories consumed that day, hours slept, etc., just as community dashboards do not track off-site attitudes and behaviors of community members. Community managers can be blinded by the ease with which these numbers are provided by the dashboard and forget to track other important metrics. That’s why it is important that a measurement plan is developed in tandem with community strategy, not in reaction to the metrics generated by the community platform.

For companies launching marketing communities, I recommend the following measurement approach:

1. Start with the goals of the community

• Establish a measurement plan based on focused goals for the community.  Is the goal conversion, customer retention, sentiment, etc.?
• Avoid the trap of borrowing metrics from other marketing initiatives because they are familiar.

2. Identify the desired community behaviors to prove these goals and the associated platforms tracking these behaviors

• Think broadly about desired community member behaviors (online and offline) that have implications for desired community outcomes.
• Tracking these behaviors typically means pulling data from multiple sources including the community dashboard, web analytics platform, social media monitoring service, URL shortening service, CRM system as well as community member surveys.
• Collaborating with colleagues from your analytics, customer insights, customer service, and IT departments will help you make sense of all of these data stacks.

3. Consider all initiatives that support community success

• Keep in mind all of the paid and earned media initiatives (e.g., promotions and referrals) that will contribute to community success and consider integrating the associated metrics into a community scorecard.

4. Select the best metrics to tell the story of community progress

• Now that you have considered all of the possible metrics for proving desired community outcomes, refocus the measurement plan with the right balance of metrics that tell the story.  That might translate to three key metrics to support each community goal, for example.

5. Establish a baseline

• Determine if the metrics that are part of your community measurement plan were collected historically, or if you need to establish a baseline.  Do not establish specific numbered goals (e.g., 15% increase in positive sentiment) without knowing the baseline from which you are working.  Otherwise, you risk setting unrealistic goals.

6. Set specific targets to stay focused while allowing for some flexibility

• Once you establish a baseline, set specific (realistic) monthly and quarterly targets to serve as motivators to keep you focused on your goals.
• Maintain a flexible approach to your measurement plan as you discover what works and what doesn’t work for reporting purposes.

Capturing a holistic picture of community health and progress requires a tremendous amount of planning and integration.  Community dashboards provide only a piece of the puzzle.  This is why the marketer’s role involves both art and science.

I was invited to present on the topic of social media measurement recently at two great social media camps; thanks to both The Advertising Research Foundation (@The_ARF) and PR+MKTG Camp (@PRMKTGCamp) for organizing catalysts for conversation. At The ARF Social Media Bootcamp I engaged discussion on the topic of “measuring social media’s effectiveness” and at PR+MKTG Camp East my panel workshopped and discussed “establishing business impact metrics and analytics.” These topics aligned well to our Social Architecture framework for business planning and Customer Participation.

Both events generated questions about social media indices like Klout or the Vitrue Social Media Index. They also inquired about key measurement indicators such as Facebook Likes and more. These are questions that clients and groups like these commonly ask. It is the social nature of our medium that generates new metrics and more measurement confusion; because we can measure it does not mean we should. Kate Rush Sheehy (@katerushsheehy) brings home this point in her post “measure what matters.”

The reality is that the indices and Likes have unique value but they also have no value at all if not relevant to business goals. Business success in Customer Participation or social media is driven by strategic planning and insights that inform our tactical decisions and execution. Your measurement approach must be aligned to your business goals and designed to build your baseline statistics through your scorebook.

• Monitoring: Keyword monitoring and reputation are just starting points for monitoring. A social monitoring process to provide insights to your marketing, sales, service and communications teams must align the unique needs of these organizations. The Social Architecture offered by Cynthia Pflaum (@cpflaum) outlines this well in her post “committing to social media monitoring.”
• Competitive: Moving beyond community size comparisons as your sole criteria for “how are we doing.” Evaluate your competitors with similar study to the measure of your performance. Tom Cummings (@tomcummings) recently posted about this “is your company good at social media?”
• Editorial: Each post is measured by topic, supporting media, targeting, frequency, language and other supporting campaigns/communication, etc… The results build your baseline and when applied externally inform about the baseline of competitors.
• Engagement: Each social action offered to your community is to drive engagement. Monitoring and weighting of these community actions will provide data points about their engagement with your editorial, apps or overall offering. This reaction to your action helps to inform about your community health or growth. Another key metric for evaluating the momentum of your competitors.

Your scorebook will be part of your framework to track of your posts and comments just as you would record pitches, hits and runs. This baseline will inform your overall Social Architecture strategy and your day-to-day gameplan. Your foundation and situational understanding of your community, your content and other relevant context are your points of validation for your business planning with your organization. Your investment in your core data is essential to social business success and it just might help you odds in your office fantasy sports pool.

It’s a question we get a lot as we help clients design social business strategies. In our experience, there are few companies that aren’t trying to connect the dots between their social efforts and results. It’s not 2008 anymore where marketers can secure budget for social initiatives because “everyone else is doing it,” or “but, we’ll be left in dust!” CMOs want to know exactly what return they are getting for their media spend, just as they do after any other media buy.

However, according to a study conducted last year by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, 84% of global marketers aren’t measuring the return on their investment. Of that same group of marketers, 90% weren’t sure they even had the technology to measure a hard return on investment. That’s not to say brands aren’t trying. A few months ago, McDonald’s announced that they saw a 33% increase in foot traffic in conjunction with their Foursquare Day promotion. Aha! A brand that figured out how to do it! Only, a couple of days later, McDonald’s admitted that what they actually experienced was a 33% increase in Foursquare checkins, not foot traffic. Oops.

The confusion isn’t surprising. A lot of companies are unclear on what metrics they should be measuring and what those measurements are telling them about the success or failure of their endeavors. There are near infinite measurement possibilities; buzz, share of voice, influence of consumers reached, clicks, likes, growth rate of fans/followers/subscribers, sentiment, traffic. The list goes on and on. Measurement dashboards that come with every new tool or platform don’t make it any easier to determine what should be evaluated. They provide reports on every metric than can be measured, though not necessarily what should be measured. Therein, lies the real issue: frequently, what’s being measured isn’t what really matters.

So, that brings me back to the question, “How should you measure success?” Here are some helpful guidelines.

Determine what success means to you (and be realistic). Figure out what you want the return on your investment to be. Is it sales? You will have a hard time tying a feel-good campaign with no call-to-action to increased sales. Period. So, if sales are your ultimate objective, design your campaign or initiative in a way that makes sense and will help you achieve that goal. @DellOutlet is a perfect example. Stefanie at Dell started tweeting in June of 2007. A few months in, she decided she wanted to do more and developed a strategy for using Twitter for driving sales. (They’ve seen over $7 million in directly-attributable sales since).

Choose relevant metrics. Once objectives have been set, determine what can be measured, and eliminate superfluous metrics from your criteria. Again, if your goal is driving sales, then the number of YouTube channel views is probably not the most useful metric. Measure what should be measured. Earlier this year, we did a social servicing project with TurboTax. Their goal was to surprise and delight customers and gain recognition as a customer-focused support organization. They knew they wouldn’t be able to sufficiently gauge customer satisfaction with pre-existing metrics, so they created feedback surveys that were sent to every user serviced. As it turned out, the survey informed them that their customers were 71% more likely to recommend TurboTax because of their interactions with the company on Twitter.

Analyze, evolve, and track. Once the campaign is in full swing and data is available, ascertain that the right campaign metrics have been chosen. If they have, begin to track the data on a regular basis. However, if you aren’t able to confirm success or failure with the metrics you’ve selected, evolve them. Identify another method for evaluating the initiative’s value. Gatorade’s Mission Control Command Center does just this. The marketing team monitors online discussions, sports trends, media performance and general sports buzz in order to determine their relevancy in the sports beverage market (with the ultimate goal of reversing a 3-year slip in sales by increasing real-time participation and top-of-mind awareness). Gatorade, in addition to monitoring the data daily, regularly evolves and tracks the trended data and correlates it with other relevant information (sales, for example) to determine whether or not they’re measuring the right thing.

The key takeaway here is that brands should measure what matters and will help them to achieve their specific objectives. When businesses only pave the cowpath instead of reinventing their measurement models around social, then they will only see incremental results at best. Social is a whole new way of doing business. Just as strategies and processes will need to adapt, so will metrics.

I keep hearing this come up… with respect to LEED certification on buildings, Wal-Mart’s sustainability index, and several other newsworthy scoring systems of late.

Is a nutrition label the ultimate scorecard?

What’s interesting about nutrition labels is that they present several numbers– everything isn’t added up into a single grade or score. In today’s business world, there’s a tendency to add everything up, particularly when it comes to incorporating social media metrics as KPIs.

This is a trap!

One number doesn’t necessarily provide a shortcut to all the varied aspects of business. That’s not to say we should open the floodgates and serve up raw data. Like individual food items impacting your nutritional profile, several variables play roles in your overall social media presence and your overall business performance.

A scorecard should provide guidance on what we cannot immediately discern the health of, be it a food, community, or business. The trick is to find the right level of aggregation. That is, we need to elevate low level behaviors to the appropriate categories and then leave them there, not continue to aggregate (i.e. create one score).

Edelman’s SMI was one of the first to add things up across platforms. At the time, it was pioneering and innovative. Jonny Bentwood and David Brain were creative and transparent about their methodology. They were also wary of and vocal about the subjectivity involved.

“This is definitely adding apples to oranges we admit. So for example, we are placing a score for Facebook depending on the number of friends someone has. For Twitter, it is the number of friends, followers and updates. And if that is not insulting enough, we are then coming to a comparative weighting of someone’s Facebook score against their Twitter and blogging score. And the most sinful step is of course the final one where we have added those scores together and come up with a total Social Media Index.”

You, like the rest of the business world, are probably interested in building the ultimate scorecard. You might even be engaging in methodology like the above.

Make sure you are highlighting the right aspects of your business– things that measure important movement and things that matter to those who consume the numbers. Choose metrics that impact your “overall meal”– like calories and fat, but also recognize there is value in certain parts of the whole, like qualitative assessments.

What does your organization’s nutrition label look like?

Now I wonder how often we use this device when it comes to social measurement.

Whether I talk to an IT consultant or marketing strategist, one answer is always the same. A question about measuring success is met with a long response. For some, data collection is in-progress. But many borrow familiar metrics like clicks and counts to gauge success. Why are people stuck in this cycle?

It’s time to interpret the data from your social initiatives in a meaningful way:

• Return to your objectives. Today the problem isn’t leading with business goals but sticking with them. Without examining data in context, you risk losing the chance to prove what you’ve actually accomplished. For example, tracking how many blogs were created on your internal collaboration platform tells you nothing about how you retain talent. But trending employee satisfaction does. Analyzing data as it relates to your objectives helps uncover relevant behaviors — not just those measured most easily.

• Tap into multiple stakeholder perspectives to define value. Different business units depend on different things. Consider developing a dashboard that accounts for the diverse proof points individual departments need. For instance, a marketer managing a customer idea community could track customer satisfaction and the number of testable ideas generated to satisfy customer care and market research.

• Treat metrics as insight tools, not just ones that output results. Most people interpret metrics in absolute terms. Their results illustrate the success or failure of whatever initiative they analyze. Examine them in more detail and the same information can help define strategy, pinpoint necessary changes, and identify future opportunity.

Just as a musician has his own style, brands must develop metrics that consider their business needs first. This requires renewed attention to our choices — recognizing where we must blaze trails of our own. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but at what cost?

What are some of the ways you’ve avoided this metrics trap?

I have been considering different approaches for capturing, filtering and modeling social media engagement data for some time. Like most other practitioners I talk with – we are generating more data than we can analyze. I have a stack of Short URL data, another with SEO data, another with Media data, another from Web Analytics, more from Social Media Analytics – Facebook or YouTube Insights, newly added Listening data, updates from CRM, with the newest and largest stack from Moderation. Certainly you may have more …. What do you do with your data stacks?

The burden of ownership of these stacks is that they are a combination of structured and unstructured data. We can neatly capture the structured data like time, date, profile name, network, location, browser type, tags, etc … The unstructured information is where many times the real insights exist. This is where we will find comments, blog posts, video responses, photos shared, etc … It is the balance of content with context that provides us with the real world relationships that describe the editorial measurement, community health or overall social engagement. This is the challenge of social media measurement as it is combines your web analytics standards with those of your social media data. O’Reilly Media (@oreillymedia) author, Sean Power (@seanpower) lead an Enterprise 2.0 Boston (@e2conf) session this week that aligned with my approach and offered a deep course in this integrated analytics or communilytics approach [see slide 95 to visualize this synthesis]. This brings the insights team off the sidelines and into the planning and delivery of the program goals.

Insights are in the eye of the beholder when it comes to measurement. The lens that I view these data stacks is very different than my colleagues that are observing from the lens of eCommerce, Marketing, Brand Manager, Public Relations, Customer Service, Investor Relations or Information Technology.  Each functional organization has different data elements that can be organized to model a possible solution set relevant for their insights. This dynamic is what drives the collection of these data stacks but the hoarding of data does not benefit the enterprise if it is not accessible and flexible. Your collection of  spreadsheets containing silos of data – only useful to the limited asynchronous owners. This model is single dimensional and focused on the structured data.

This brings me back to the snake cube. The view of this information reminds me of a project I worked on a project a few years ago where we modeled structured and unstructured video data to help inform a fantastic video search engine – dabble. The model we used was the OLAP cube to bring dimension to the data stacks we had maintained to develop new products with the core meta and search data. Capturing these data stacks as a cube offers as one of many forms of business intelligence to model your analytics. Bringing this agility to your data stacks to unlock insights will open the possibilities for you and other supporting organizations to develop formulas and benchmarks that bring the insights and evidence to fund, scale and better engage your communities. Embracing this flexible and business intelligence can move the social media efforts into the center of your brand planning rather than an after action review. Gatorade (@gatorade) and PepsiCo (@pepsico) has harnessed this approach to power the Zeitgeist and Mission Controlcenter. Are you ready for your analytics and analysts to have a seat at your digital table?

You work with CMO’s at the top retail and manufacturer brands in the world. What issues are at the top of their list going into 2010?

We work with marketing leadership at over 750 clients. CMOs state they are doubling their investment in social media marketing, and expect measurement of these programs to grow more than that. One top issue is how to measure this. It’s a top issue because the other top issue they grapple with is how to increase measurability and accountability in a growing reputation-based market. Interactive brand building involves more customer participation than broadcast marketing. They don’t know where to start, how to measure and how to scale this strategy. Now there may be other top issues of course, such as growing sales with shrinking budgets, but this is the area we talk to them about most often.

Where are some places to find the voice of the customer that might not be obvious?

It’s amazing how many execs and brand managers don’t have Google Alerts on their brand, product and competitor names. That may be obvious to someone like you and me, but there are a lot of non-digital-savvy executives who have never seen a Google alert. The most impactful method of finding the voice of the customer is to facilitate it yourself. We do that by facilitating customer stories, questions, answers and product reviews. Certain types of contributions from customers are more meaningful than others, because when customers talk directly about a product, brand or service to others the company is able to ‘listen in’ and leverage a form of digital word of mouth for marketing and culture change. When the brand puts the customer voice in their own hands (as opposed to just listening outside its own walls), they take ownership and action.

Are you starting to see these conversations moving from the halls of the marketing department to other areas of the business, and are they starting to see some real business results?

For me this is the most exciting part about what we do with our clients. I call customer-created content the “Trojan horse” of customer centricity. What was thought of as a digital marketing strategy became a culture shift by democratizing the customer content and data throughout the organization. I have another term for that: “Customer Oxygen.” When every person in an organization can get operational data and ‘voice’ from customers that are relevant to their jobs and decisions, it’s like their breathing a new oxygen that changes micro and macro policies. Product development cycles go from 3 months to 3 days. Merchandisers use new data to choose products or pull product from shelves. Market research – and more importantly, operators – better understand how customers think and buy. And CEOs have a new measure of accountability. As a student of customer-centric strategy, it’s a beautiful thing!