Today we’ve added a new metric to our mediasphere360 Social Media monitoring and analysis tool; we call it the Echo Ratio. So what’s that? Quite simply, we look at Social Media marketing campaigns or activity that we monitor for clients and can measure the viral uptake of a campaign, meme or discussion topic being monitored.
In Social Media marketing campaigns and with any meme or hot topic, the content delivered starts somewhere; someone “tweets” it out, posts to YouTube or similar and then finds Conversation Igniters to start the spread. In some cases it’s just a blog that someone posts and it takes off like wildfire. This often happens with high profile bloggers/thought leaders like Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang, Seth Godin or Beth Harte. read more
Best Practices•
on November 21st, 2008•
Analysis Paralysis – when you’ve got so much data that you stop making effective business decisions. It happens to the best of us. Perhaps more so now. Marketers and communicators engaging in Social Media are debating heatedly over what metrics are right, what exactly to measure and what to report and how…and so on. With digital media, analysis becomes a easier than ever before – and both marketers and PR professionals are in part to blame, since they hyped this ability to collect such data. Add in that more CEO’s are spending their time bogged down in financial management than building the business, we have a situation ripe for analysis paralysis. There are so many measurement tools for Social Media that it is easy to become overwhelmed – and make the wrong decision, so no decision is made.
Marketers and PR pro’s will dump mass amounts of data into clients laps saying “look, it worked”, and this data then ends up in front of the CFO to justify the budget spends, which in turn has the CFO and CEO discussing budget spends – with too much data to make a truly effective decision. The issue then becomes over-analysis, getting to the minutiae that may not support a good decision by both marketers/communicators and finance.
Metrics are important, analysis should be done, it can help shape better financial and marketing/PR decisions. A CFO will spend money if it is justified, but it’s all about the “right” amount of analysis. So when running campaign or event analysis, concentrate just on the factual data that matters. Set the end metric first, then a few milestones to measure on the way to that goal. Good marketing is a managed investment, and managed properly the return is “growth” however that is organizationally defined. We often advocate heads of marketing and finance working together to align the strategic goals, while the “implementers” or tactical folks in marketing/communications and finance iron out the details.
Today, many financial managers have much a broader understanding of business. Working together you can set expectations on what amounts of data you really need to measure successes and failure and avoid analysis paralysis.
Here’s a dichotomy; A Forbes and Gartner report shows, surprisingly, that the majority of CEO’s get their news from the Web, not newspapers. In fact, the study shows 70% of CEO’s view the Web as the single most important source for news. Yet Social Media struggles for integration with communications budgets and PR firms are still wrapping their heads around Social Media and it’s linkages to Traditional Media. read more