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.

For Social Media marketing communications however, a key objective is to have the message/story/content spread as far and wide to the influence group your targeting as possible. Sadly, it doesn’t always take off for a number of reasons.

With any topic or issue, there are only so many who will be interested in what someone is saying. We already measure for influence on an issue/topic/content so what we noticed in our research is that there is always an echo effect. The Echo Effect in Social Media is the result of a “group” that always bounces around similar content amongst each other, but the content seems to hit an invisible wall and spreads very little beyond the Echo Group.

So with the Echo Ratio, we can establish the general outline of an Echo Group and then determine the Echo Ratio which is a look at how much the story spreads beyond the Echo Group (often the Conversation Igniters that start the topic.) So a ratio might be 8:2 which means 80% of the conversation/campaign is staying within the Echo Group we’ve identified and only 20% of the time is the story getting to new eyeballs or ears. If you’re targeting a wide spread in your objective, this would not be good.

Of the 12 times we’ve employed this new measurement we’ve found a heavier weighting towards the Echo Group, but if the campaign is good and spreads this changes. In the first few days you may start at say 8:2 but as the content spreads beyond the Echo Group you’ll find it moving towards say 4:6 which means the story is spreading beyond Echo Group.

We consider this an important benchmark metric to not just campaigns, but for organizations themselves in ongoing online reputation management, online brand monitoring or in a Social Media crisis.

If you have further questions about our Echo Ratio or how we establish an Echo Group, feel free to contact us info_at_mediabadger.com for a quick chat.

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.

The study covered 639 C-Level executives (including CEO’s, CFO, COO, CMO) and over 50% were from companies with 1,000+ employees. Over 20% of the CEO’s lead companies with revenues in excess of $1 Billion in annual revenues. The survey was the U.S. only. 67% viewed the Web as their primary news source with newspapers coming in second at 17% and TV only at 3%. In looking at their share of time spent with media, a whopping 41% of that time was on the Web followed by TV at 21%.

In terms of Social Media interaction 30% said they read blogs, while 19% participate in online chats and 14% maintain a blog or post regularly to blogs. Microblogging an IM was not covered. These are, we think, surprisingly high numbers for Social Media usage.

So why is it still a struggle to get budget approvals for Social Media campaigns and leveraging the Web beyond classic marketing efforts? In part we think, because Social Media is still struggling to show value in a measurable and definable way. Marketing campaigns can be measured with all kinds of analytics programs. Yet Social Media is more about “conversations” with various key stakeholder audiences. Insightful Social Media expert Chris Brogan provides key views on measurement as does Jeremiah Owyang in terms of Social Networks measurement. These are excellent starting points, but like Web analytics a few years ago, measuring Social Media is still in it’s infancy. PR agencies are moving aggressively to understand and engage Social Media, but still have some hesitancy. We think this is for two reasons 1) measurement and 2) loss of direct control of the message/story. The loss of message/story control may be another factor for C-Level buy-in on Social Media as well.

What is encouraging however, is that there is increasing use and acceptance of the Web in the C-Level suite. CEO’s are beginning to view the Web as more than just a marketing channel, proving value to leverage Social Media however, is still for the early adopters stage we think.