The Car Dashboard

When one thinks about a dashboard, the first thing that most people think of is a car dashboard.  Car dashboards have changed over the years, of course, and include such features as outdoor and indoor temperature, average gas mileage, compass, seatbelt warning light, etc.  But at its essence, a car dashboard includes an odometer, a speedometer, a coolant temperature gauge, a fuel gauge, and a tachometer: collectively considered the most essential instruments in the dashboard.  These instruments measure distance traveled, current speed, coolant temperature, amount of remaining fuel and rotation speed of the wheels, respectively.

For a complex machine like a car, it’s pretty amazing that those 5 instruments can tell you exactly how your car is performing, more or less.

At its core, the car dashboard, as a whole, serves to dynamically visualize to the driver the current state and health of the car. It would be foolish to think that one could drive for long using merely the speedometer, for example, to guide your journey, or simply the odometer, for that matter.  One could overheat the engine or run out of gas without the slightest hint that such an event was imminent.  It’s possible, however, that one could do just fine for a while.  One might have gotten good at estimating how far one could go before filling up the gas tank or how fast one is going without breaking the speed limit.  But for an activity that kills 113 drivers a day in America, driving with as many essential instruments at your disposal could be the difference between life and death.

The Social Media Dashboard

Similarly, most social media dashboards get it wrong because they include some – but not all – of the instruments necessary to run and optimize a successful social media department.  Many social media managers think that they are doing fine with the metrics and measures they currently measure, rationalizing approaches with statements like, “I measure what I can” or “at least I’m measuring something” without ever fully realizing why they are measuring those things in the first place.  As a result, social media marketers find it difficult not only to justify their role and need for budget, but also to play a meaningful part in the marketing mix, hampered by legitimacy and credibility issues. Ironic, because social media marketing is the most measureable marketing channel that has ever existed.  If your social media dashboard is not telling you exactly how your efforts in social media are contributing to your business objectives, you’re just not trying hard enough.

The Engagement “Sweet Spot”

Social media is completely ingrained into the daily lives of your customers and they are adapting to the myriad ways that marketers are trying to reach out to them.  Brands constantly seek the “sweet spot” to engage with customers and prospects in meaningful dialogue to reap the benefits of all the time, energy and investment spent on social media efforts.

To ultimately reach the “sweet spot” with your customers, you’ll need a dashboard that will report all necessary metrics that inform you, in real time, on progress towards stated social media objectives.  The best social media marketers are the ones capable of adapting to information presented by ramping up or down on engagement tactics or adjusting the engagement strategy outright, while shifting budget, resources and time allocations.

So the first question to ask yourself is when building a dashboard is, “what are the business objectives you are trying to achieve through your social media marketing efforts?”

Social Media Business Objectives

From my experience, most brands tend to have these objectives (whether they know it or not), although there are many more:

1. Branding
2. Funneling Traffic to Purchase
3. Fostering Customer Loyalty
4. Delivering Customer Service

Depending on what a brand is selling, it might adopt one or more of these objectives.  For example, a large retailer like Walmart might aim to adopt all of these objectives while a brand like Red Bull might focus more on branding and customer loyalty.

Whatever objectives one adopts, the path towards credibility starts with orienting measurement of objectives to business goals using impartial, transparent and accountable measures.

More importantly, it’s vital to limit what you measure so that the dashboard is a succinct and clear indicator of progress toward defined business objectives, while delivering diagnostic insight and predictive foresight in order to stay nimble.  In other words, if one’s dashboard doesn’t deliver actionable insight into past activity and prognostic information about future plans, your dashboard is merely going to be a collection of numbers, causing one to celebrate when certain numbers go up and to lament certain numbers going down.

In my next post, I’ll lay out precisely the types of metrics and measures one should keep an eye on to track whether you are achieving your social media marketing goals.

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.

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.

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?

Like kids with full bags of Halloween candy, we’re impulsively reacting to what can be measured without thinking about what should be measured and how. Our obstacle is our gut. We rely on it at the cost of validity… enduring value for a business.

As far as I can tell, there are three major opportunities that could improve the situation, unlocking the value of conversations and other social interactions. But first, we have to overcome some very basic human tendencies:

1. The ease of counts
We’re human, so ease and simplicity reign. This leads us to prioritize basic counts, things like the volume of tweets and re-tweets. Counts are often good shortcuts, but they masquerade as much as they reveal. We so easily feel pride when our own Tweets rake in the love without realizing the incestuous network centrality: we’re all telling each other the same news. The beckoning opportunity is to analyze the structural patterns now at our fingertips with massive and varied social graphs. Simply put, patterns are better indicators than counts.

2. The shine of the surface
We’re attracted to shiny, superficial objects. For example, when measuring blogs, we think about ‘brand mentions’ or how many comments there are. Our focal point is what’s vivid. The opportunity is the depth: the style with which people discuss brands, the memes that emerge through unique semantic associations. Simple tricks, focusing analysis on slightly more invisible cues like pronoun use tell us how intimate someone is with a brand. Looking at correlations and clusters of words based on frequency and uniqueness reveal the guts of a text: the themes that are really being discussed.

3. The convenience of snapshots
We’re obsessed with snapshots. We fixate on how things are, not how they’re changing or where they’re going. Rarely do we take the time to appreciate time; time series, trends, in-the-moment measurement. Aggregates are typically not as revealing as precise peaks and valleys; asking someone to report what they’ve accomplished at the end of the day will never be as nuanced (or accurate) as asking them in the moment, throughout the day, not to mention collecting the data without asking. Opportunity knocks with real-time, in-situ measures. Measuring momentum and identifying cycles will better highlight the social dynamic. Interactions aren’t static, so their measurements shouldn’t be either.

To move beyond what we’re doing today and embrace what can be done, we need to agree there are wholly different types of data available and measurement techniques involved. We need to abandon some traditional standards and stop forcing social data into shapes and sizes that work for other media measurement. Tomorrow is about patterns, depth, and dynamic metrics.

Speak up if you’re having trouble quantifying the value of social interactions. We’re here to provide solutions to all these gaps so that more meaningful measurement can help our clients capture the value of social business. Tell us about your challenges below and subscribe to this feed to keep the conversation going.

If you’re at Enterprise 2.0 today, stop by my panel on Social Analytics, moderated by my colleague, Jevon MacDonald. Margaret Francis of Scout Labs, Timo Elliott of SAP, and Tim Young of Socialcast will be talking through themes similar to the above (Twitter #e2conf-31).