Measuring Social Media: Interview with Web Analytics Guru Jim Sterne

Measuring Social Media

Larry Chase: Why is it so hard to connect Social Media and ROI?

Jim Sterne: Youth of the medium. We haven't been doing it very long. At the moment, we're measuring what people are saying, and we join the conversation and measure the impact of that joining and the impact of our involvement and our engagement. We're measuring within the social sphere. Did we get more followers, "Likes" and retweets?

But the conversation, "Did it result in more sales?," is a conversation happening in a different department in the building.

Connecting Social Media people with Direct Marketing people, Web people and call center people is really tough. This is a problem we've always faced, trying to get together all of those groups. Because the Social group is so new, and they're so busy talking to each other, they're like the web team 15 years ago.

LC: They know they're on to something, but nobody else really gets it.

JS: And they don't know how to speak anybody else's language. "I got 2 million followers!" "So?"

Connecting the Dots

LC: Is this where you have to start connecting the dots if you want to justify the Social Media budget to your boss?

JS: You want to be able to say, "Every time we increase our followers by X number or X percent, we see sales go up Y percent, and we believe there to be this correlation. We might even claim causation, and we'd like to have enough money to run some tests and have people analyze the results, and then we'll have the answer."

But, the Social Media people are so enthralled with discovering how to do it, how to measure it and which tools to use that when the boss asks, "How's that Social Media thing going?," what he/she wants to hear is "We're making $3 for every $1 we invest." Instead, what the boss is getting is retweets, follows and likes.

The Secret Sauce for Hot SocMed Campaigns

LC: We have seen many SocMed campaigns that have "gone hot," but have you seen any companies that can do this consistently?

JS: Not really. It's a weird confluence of senior management giving the right budget to the right creative team with the right ideas and the right execution at the right moment in time.

You can't buy it. You luck into it. It's lucky they had that executive and that budget and that product go out in the marketplace at that time.

Also, they had those executives with that budget understand they needed a certain kind of measurement in advance of the campaign. They were able to collect good information and were able to make good course corrections.

Most campaigns are "launch, read the results and pat yourself on the back and go do it again" instead of building a philosophy and long-term strategy of how to promote the company and go from strength to strength.

You have to have a CMO with a life span longer than 18 months to make that happen.

"Cool" Versus "Creepy"

LC: We're in this period of data super collection. "They" know a lot about us. You looked at a pair of red shoes at an online shoe store, and now you see ads for those same shoes everywhere you go on the web. It's creepy and cool at the same time.

JS: It's creepy because it's done by people who are doing it badly. If you do it well, it's welcome.

LC: How would you do it less intrusively?

JS: By leveraging recency and frequency. If the ad shows up too soon or too frequently, you annoy people. That's the marketplace telling me I'm pushing too hard. So, I optimize my spend appropriately.

LC: What about offering incentives? Does that make it less creepy?

JS: Yes, because now we're just negotiating. That's the magic of doing this stuff well.

Advertising on LinkedIn versus Facebook

LC: Have you used LinkedIn to market your eMetrics Summits?

JS: Yes, it works brilliantly. Facebook is okay, but not nearly as good as LinkedIn. We have advertised on LinkedIn using job title and work experience.

Whenever "marketing" and "analytics" show up on the [LinkedIn user's] page, or if their Twitter account is posted to their LinkedIn page, and it says "I just read a white paper on analytics," or the user's title happens to include "marketing," we throw them an ad.

LC: You use both Facebook and LinkedIn to advertise eMetrics. What differences do you see between the two platforms?

JS: Lots more traffic from Facebook, but lots more conversions from LinkedIn.

Hot Button Sessions at eMetrics Summits

LC: What are the hot sessions at your eMetrics Summits?

JS: It's still Social Media, and it's some of the more tactical stuff. We get a mix.

We have these conferences that are offshoots so that the people who are really interested in deep data analysis go to the room next door, which is Predictive Analytics. People who are interested in the specific how-tos go to Conversion Conference. We also have the GAUGE conference for the Google Analytics people [Google Analytics Users' Great Experience].

LC: With Predictive Analytics, what is being done today that will wow people who don't already know about it?

JS: Jeff Jonas at IBM gave a great presentation at our eMetrics conference in New York. He said the most revealing data of all, which nobody is paying attention to, is location and time, and it's coming right out of your telephone. Where you are and when tells me if you're a student, if you're ill, how expensive a car you're going to buy, or how often you go to Starbucks.

I can then match it up with your social network to see who you're hanging around with. It's ridiculously revealing.

Resources

Jim Sterne is a Web strategy consultant and Founder of eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summits held worldwide. He is the author of Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment.

Jim recommends these other resources:

• Social Media Metrics Secrets by John Lovett
• Occam's Razor, the blog by Avinash Kaushik, author and Google's "Digital Marketing Evangelist"