New social media are constantly emerging into the day-to-day scene of the business world. Corporations and regular people alike are using these tools to engage in two-way conversations. Social media is used to create participation between businesses and their publics. Many corporations are afraid to use new social media because they don’t know how to measure their return on investment (ROI) and don’t know how to measure their success with these new tools. Measuring new social media is still difficult, but it can be done.
You cannot use traditional means to measure the success of new technology. People are moving and do not want to spend time filling out mail-in surveys, which your corporation would then have to wait to receive and then review anyway. Time is becoming more valuable everyday and cannot be wasted. So… learning to measure new social media effectively is very important. You can begin to measure this technology by the number of blog posts about your company, the number of comments, the tone of the posts and comments, video views, click thrus, how many visitors to your site, and how much content on the first page of a search. These are just some ways to start, but not necessarily the only ways or the best ways.
Jon Gibs, the Vice President of Media Analytics at Nielsen, describes a program called Buzzmetics at Nielsen in the video provided below. Gibbs explains, toward the middle of the video, that new blogs are important to measure, it does come with problems.
These problems are caused because this social media is so new and has not had time to find the best ways to be measured. So how do we know the best ways to measure our social media tactics? We don’t. But we can try to find out.
February 25, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Heather,
I agree, measuring the success of a blog isn’t easy–especially new blogs. It can take months to drive readers to your blog. Even large corporate CEO blogs take time and effort to gain loyal readers. A suggestion I have for you is to pitch the arguments that social media professionals make in their scholarly works or blogs to create a successful blog. Once you have listed ways to build a successful blog, you could cite other sources to see how each one of those methods worked.
I recommend John Cass’s book, “Strategies for Tools and Corporate Blogging,” Chapter 3, for ideas on how to drive readers to your blog. Cass also highlights ways to improve SEO rankings, links, and reader loyalty. Check out these ideas and then see if other professionals have spent time measuring them.