Blogs, message boards, facebook, myspace, linkedin, youtube, twitter ... Look at all these customers discussing products and passing along branded content! Online social networks attract audiences
that are the envy of both traditional channels and main Internet portals, but lets catch our breath for a minute and take a look.
Last year, 116 million u.s. consumers accessed them, while 82.5
million generated their own content, according to eMarketer. Social-network users represent a double opportunity for marketers: They both purchase products and services, and influence the purchase
behaviors of other consumers in the network. Social networks can also serve as a source of insight about consumers' lifestyles and preferences, their attitudes toward the brands, and as feedback
channels allowing them to interact with corporations directly.
Social media provides both mass audiences and deep insights into what makes these audiences tick. But let's admit it: We are mildly
perplexed about how this all fits into the business of advertising. Why else would we communications experts slip into linguistic fallacies when talking about this phenomenon? "Digital word-of-mouth"
is an oxymoron: When something is published, digitally or otherwise, it isn't word-of-mouth anymore. "Social media," on the other hand, is a pleonasm, just like "burning flame": All media are
social inasmuch as they are inseparable from the society of humans - or at least, all the media discussed in this magazine.
But it's not linguistics that's keeping us from realizing the full
potential of social media. There are a number of areas in which our collective understanding could use some development - and, specifically, the development of effective metrics.
Today, there is
no shortage of social media measurement companies. Indeed, the raw data is easy to access and process - so easy, in fact, that there are already five different providers dealing exclusively with
Twitter metrics. And marketers' increasing curiosity about social networking has given birth to research vendors who focus on monitoring discussion volumes and delivering dashboards centered on
mentions of specific issues or brands. These vendors quantify the number of times the brand or company is mentioned in blogs, on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter, especially when supplemented with
sophisticated sentiment analysis that discerns positive brand mentions from the negative. The rationale here is that positive brand mentions are somewhat like brand advocacy by influentials, and so
the goal of any aspiring social marketer is to promote them.
But as volumes of user-generated content grow, it becomes harder to believe that all these users and posters are really opinion
leaders. What about those users who do not post their comments on a particular subject? Do we know whether buzz affects them or not - or at least how many of them are out there reading the posts? And
what are the business results of this positive - or negative - buzz? Unfortunately, few tracking companies provide information that is comparable to the results coming from other media and relevant to
advertisers' overall campaign goals.
So what insights do advertisers need in order to successfully operate in this new environment? Until now, marketing was about producing change by delivering
a message to the audience. Today, it is about triggering change through conversation. Knowing what the conversation is about is the prerequisite for an intelligent conversation - and here is where all
monitoring and listening platforms may prove helpful.
The real value of social media to advertisers, however, lies in the attitudinal and behavioral changes that happen to network users as the
result of the information flow within the network.
Some of the research providers are heading in the right direction. ComScore's Widget Metrix examines reach and usage of widgets, those movable
Flash applications for sharing photos or music recommendations that roam freely across blogs and social-networking sites. Nielsen Online developed one of the first syndicated social media analysis
tools that, besides monitoring blogs and message boards, attempts to glean the impact individuals exert on wider network audiences. The BuzzReach matches data obtained from buzz-tracking algorithms
with the data from the metered panel. The tool calculates the probability of viewing buzz by taking into account the volume of relevant posts and amount of time spent by panelists per page view on a
home page. According to Jon Gibs, vice president of media analytics and the main brain behind this project, this allows Nielsen to estimate the size of audience that is viewing consumer-generated
content pertaining to a particular brand or an issue.
On the most basic level, BuzzReach methodology serves to compliment a campaign's opportunity-to-see measures by adding "social media GRPs."
The analysis of exposed audience behavior, however, also allows identifying influentials for targeting with online media. Moreover, with certain add-ons (such as matching with Homescan CPG purchase
behavior data) the new Nielsen tool also allows marketers to connect social-networking activity with real world sales.
InsightExpress, a company that provides digital marketing research
solutions for the measurement of advertising effectiveness and synergies across online, mobile and other media, developed a methodology to assess the branding impact of widgets, video and other
content applications within social media. Consumers aren't just watching videos and using widgets - they are eager to copy/paste and share with their friends while rating and commenting about them,
thus generating additional exposures and brand-related conversations. By tagging videos and applications, InsightExpress tracks each occurrence of sharing and estimates frequency of exposure to
particular widgets. InsightExpress also serves an occasional brief survey to gauge the branding impact of videos
and applications. By comparing responses between those exposed and unexposed to
the videos and applications, the researchers estimate lifts in brand awareness and attitudes attributable to a social media campaign.
In order to successfully advertise with social media, we
should understand the limitations of the data they generate. Buzz volume and sentiment must be enriched by syndicated and custom research as well as data from third-party servers, search trends, site
visits, brand content consumption, downloads, product research and any other possible measurements of consumer attitude and behavior. In a phrase, it's about gauging the value of consumers'
interactions with a brand on social media platforms.
Social media is growing and it will continue to grow. We owe it to ourselves, our clients, consumers,
and the new medium itself to gain
better understanding through metrics.