Who is in control of your brand?

This is a little follow up post to my predictions for social media in 2009.

People always ask the question “social media sounds good, but how do we measure it?” and there are two parts to monitoring.

1. Business outcomes

When doing social media activty its critical to measure it against ‘real world’ business outcomes like sales, perception, market research, whatever. Without that top level realisation of value, social media is near pointless for organisations.

2. Detailed analytics

Currently you can see how much traffic content generates and where it comes from, which is great, however, someone important might post about you and millions of people see it, that’d be great to know about. And when people Tweet on Twitter about your content, or update their facebook status, this is all indications of good content.

And this is where I’m getting a bit too excited, as some smart Canadians, have built a tool that does all that for you automatically and create a quality score.

They’re called PostRank, and more than anything else I love their approach/philosophy.

PostRank scoring is based on analysis of the “5 Cs” of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking. By collecting interaction metrics in these categories the overall engagement score is calculated and the PostRank value is determined.

Clicks are only one part of the rank, and they actually count clicks as the least valuable type of activity! NICE!

Activities like clicks and page views indicate lower engagement because they’re passive interactions. Clicking a link to read a blog post doesn’t require much work, and you’re not giving anything back except your reading time. It is an intentional act, however, and thus indicates a mild level of interest and engagement. Which may grow after the item is read.

So get over their, start ranking your content, see how it compares to others, and link that back to real business results. Lovely.

I’m just surprised, that these guys have been around since early 2007 and people are still asking about how we measure ‘social media’… Its here, its easy and its well awesome.

There is a lot of people debating/assuming the definition of what social media really is, and it feels like its being way over complicated.

DEFINITION: Social Media
A place where two or more PEOPLE communicate

Its nothing to do with marketing, but Social (Media) Markeitng can utilise the communications through tools like Social Networking Sites, Word-of-mouth, PR (PR agencies should own social media) and many more.

As a marketer you can use these tools to communicate with your potential customer to increase sales, grow your database, manage your brand perception and all the normal marketing outcomes.

Companies can be involved in the following ways:

1. Get involved in the conversation/communication already taking place

2. Create a new place for people to have a conversation/communication

3. Listen to the conversation/communication for research purposes

4. Stuff it all up

Rules? Well they’re defined by the people having the conversation, and I’m sorry to say there’s no blanket rules for social media, as different people have different ‘rules’.

Attitude! It’s all about the attitude you have and how it effects your approach to utilising social media. People don’t like people who’s attitude is arrogant, or rude, or evil. Think about the attitudes that are important to you, and then think about what is important to your potential customers.

Related articles:

• Social Marketing – Improving Corporate Image
• Your goal for social media marketing and marketing in 2009
• Social Media in 2009 is as simple as this…
• Why Social Media isn’t

This post on marketingcharts.com discusses the difference between under 30′s and over 40 yr old women. And in summary 40+ yr old women are online for one main reason – to shop! And they’re sophisticated too…

In contrast, women over forty have higher incomes overall and say shopping is their #1 online activity. They also research products online more than their younger counterparts and are more likely to post product reviews on shopping websites (62% vs. 53%) and to purchase products based on e-mails from companies selling things (50% vs. 45%).

Younger women are more likely to be online for social networking:

• Shopping online is less of a priority to younger women (51% vs. 59% overall) and they research products less online (37% vs. 42% overall).
• Younger women are more likely to post photos online (78%) than product reviews (53%), while older women are more likely to post product reviews.
• Younger women are less responsive than average to emails from companies, and have less disposable income.
• Younger women are more likely to have social networking profiles: 86% of those 30 years or younger have profiles.
• Young women are relatively more likely than older women to respond to someone else’s blog post (63% vs. 50% overall), post photos online (78% vs. 50% overall) write their own blog entries (46% vs. 27% overall).
• Facebook (65%) and MySpace (63%) are the most popular social networking websites for women, though 40-somethings are more active on Classmates.com (42% vs. 19% for those under 30).
• LinkedIn is more popular among high earners (41% for those with a household income of $120K+ vs. 17% overall).
• Among all women, connecting with others is the top activity on social networks, while beauty products are the top category discussed on social networks (69%). Food/restaurants and movies/entertainment are also popular, especially for younger women.

• The highest proportion of younger women have between 20 and 49 contacts on social networks, but some have hundreds of contacts, driving the average up.
• Younger women have more contacts than middle-aged women (25% of those <30 and 4% of 40-somethings have 200+ contacts.
• Women over age 40 are more likely to be connected to people they’ve met on a social network (20%) vs. women under 30 (14%).

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The guys at common craft are fantastic at explaining complex technical concepts in plain english. Check out more of their stuff here: http://www.commoncraft.com/