Monitoring Social Media 09 is taking place in London this coming Tuesday. The organiser, Luke Brynley-Jones, talks about the inspiration for the event and what it aims to achieve.

In the dying days of the summer, Asi Sharabi wrote a late night rant about the state of social media monitoring. He directed his anger squarely at the many social media monitoring services that have emerged in recent years, highlighting dodgy results, issues with data, limitations in sentiment detection and often somewhat overblown claims of what can be achieved.

As it turns out, Asi wasn’t alone in his frustration. His post struck a chord with people that resonated across the blogosphere. The debate began and is now up to 50 comments on his original post. Suppliers, agencies, brands, bloggers and data-heads: everyone seems to have chimed in with their views, gripes and come-backs. It was this frenzied discussion that led me to believe there was room for a conference that focuses squarely on social media monitoring, it’s goals, it’s potential, how it works, whether it works, it’s impact on organisations, it’s costs and how to gauge ROI.

Tuesday’s MSM09 will not be a typical social media conference. We won’t have a spew of incumbent-funded sales pitches. We aren’t beholden to any particular viewpoint. In our lead Panel discussion “What’s Wrong with Social Media Monitoring Services?”, Asi will be joined by Amelia Torode (of Compare the Meerkat renown) to debate the issues with the CEO’s of two leading monitoring services, Mark Rogers (Market Sentinel) and Nick Koudas (Sysomos).  Equally we won’t have any long, self-obsessed presentations. Our speakers get just 20 mins to make clear points and recommendations before the mic is wrestled off them.

While our focus is on monitoring and measurement, we also plan to cover important related topics, such as: the truth about data (sources, quality and accuracy); monitoring for reputation management; and “beyond brand”, i.e. how to implement monitoring as a key business process. One of the things I heard repeatedly during my consultation process was the need for experience-sharing and case studies, so we will also have a number of “live” case studies on the day and be providing attendees with a pack of case studies to read through (or watch) afterwards.

One of our “live” case studies will be provided by We Are Social’s very own Robin Grant. He will be spilling the beans about their work with Skype – explaining how they helped Skype to set-up and run their own real-time social media listening and responding programme, which tools and methodologies they used and how this helped the world’s leading VoIP provider contain a major crisis. Other “live” case studies include, Chris Thomas from The Conversation Group – who will present a social media-driven competitive analysis of the launch of the first Google Android phone – and Celia Pronto, Marketing Director of STA Travel, who will demonstrate how her team embraced social media monitoring and reaped the benefits.

Lastly, we will have a bunch of tools for attendees to try out. Visible Technologies, Brandwatch and White Vector (to name a few) will be showing off their wares in the break-out room. Hopefully, at the very least, we’ll save a few people the tiresome process of beauty pageants by getting these guys in one room. Hope you can make it!

Luke has kindly offered We Are Social readers a 10% discount on the MSM09 £195 ticket price, by entering the discount code MSM0910 when buying a ticket direct from the MSM09 site.

As I’ve mentioned before, measuring the ROI of social media on a campaign level is pretty tricky and as Sandrine pointed out a couple of weeks ago, companies may need to take a long term view in order to fully reap the benefits of social media.

However, in theory, working out the ROI of a social media programme is easy (assuming you’re measuring it over a long enough time period), as Olivier Blanchard shows us in this presentation:

Of course, there’s a lot more more to it in practice (even without resorting to econometrics, which is of course why our consultancy services may come in handy):

• In step 3 (slides 44-46), you should also consider measuring other things like:
  • Customer retention/loyalty (to understand why this is important, have a read of Chris Stephenson’s overview or his entire paper on the subject)
  • Net Promoter Score (see Paul Marsden’s study around NPS and how advocacy drives growth)
  • Brand equity (Andrew Sharp sharp gives a good overview of why you should be thinking about this).
• In steps 6 & 7 (slides 54-55) it’s possible there will be a significant lag between your efforts in social media and their potential effects so try to take this into account when looking for them

Our friend Nick Burcher, Head of Products / Partnerships EMEA at Publicis’ VivaKi, drew me a diagram last time we caught up for coffee outlining his social media world view, which he’s since written up. I think it’s a valuable perspective (although there is something missing, which I’ll come to below):

The Destination
Traditionally marketing efforts have focussed around ‘The Destination.’ Ad space is bought to push people to a main site / microsite and this could be anything from Paid Search to TV to Print. It’s all about ‘go here now!’ There is a direct correlation between ad spend and ‘Destination’ traffic. Generally increase in ad spend = increase in traffic and decreasing ad spend results in decreasing traffic.

This is changing though. New ‘Destinations’ are being created, it’s no longer just a main site or a microsite. Facebook Fan Pages are being used as an activity hub with paid ads driving traffic. Alternatively the Destination could be a YouTube channel or other social platform.

The social web is also providing new traffic driving opportunities eg Facebook Engagement ads, sponsored Diggs or socialmedia.com social banners but the biggest change to the internet landscape though is the emergence of ‘The Conversation.’

Web 1.0 was a one way street. Users went to a site and consumed information and advertisers served messages somewhere along the way. The publisher published, the consumer consumed, the advertiser advertised . On the social web the distinctions between these three areas have all blurred and changed marketing forever.

The Conversation
If advertisers can successfully participate in the Conversation then it becomes less about paid pushing. The Conversation is about engaging rather than broadcasting, and if done successfully it changes the equation. Instead of having to pay to recruit every visit, consumers can be co-opted as brand ambassadors who then will freely relay the advertiser message with consequent Destination traffic the result.

Activity targeting the Conversation needs this ‘kickstart’ to give it initial momentum. This is where new disciplines like blogger outreach and video seeding come in. This is where marketers need to think of taking content to the consumer, rather than expecting consumers to come to them – and make it easy to share using ‘Blog This’ buttons, Facebook Connect and more.

Nick is right to point that it’s no longer just about ad spend, that Destinations no longer need to be microsites (if they ever did), that the Conversation is about engaging rather than broadcasting, and that traffic can flow from the Destination to the Conversation. But what the model doesn’t take account of, is the fact that it’s the Conversation, not the Destination, that’s important, and that in some cases there doesn’t need to be a Destination.

The Conversation itself sometimes can fulfill your business or marketing objectives without reference to a Destination, creating demand by driving awareness, consideration and/or engagement through far-reaching word of mouth – whether that be through simply getting the product into the hands of bloggers and generating reviews, through viral seeding where the vast majority of the video views happen out there in the conversation cloud or through a myriad of other ways.

More progressively (and effectively), you still have a Destination, but it’s designed to facilitate, support and amplify the Conversation, and success is measured not in traffic to the Destination, but in the reach, sentiment and engagement with the Conversation itself.

Last Wednesday we hosted our second MeasurementCamp. It was very much a last-minute affair – we stepped in to host it after an appeal on Twitter the day before. Given the late arrangement it was a smaller crowd than usual, but at the same time it was intimate and very much like the first few MeasurementCamps – with fewer people we were able to hold it as a single discussion session.

I presented a case study on our recent Dunlop campaign, with a measurement-focused angle. The key learning was what we ended up measuring was different from the KPIs we had agreed at the start, owing to a change in circumstances – and that raw numbers don’t tell the whole story. For example, the audience for our Twitter activity in setting the record straight was in the tens of thousands, far less than the total audience for the blogs, but it was important to target them as they were in a chatty, lively community where misinformation has the potential to spread quickly.

We then had a breakout session where we talked about specific metrics, and how best to classify them. There was a consensus that different campaigns and clients need different metrics, but the question was raised of how to select them.

So we thought publishing this framework might be useful. The first classification – ‘traditional’ v. ‘social’ is relatively easy to make, but even then a ‘social’ metric varies from viewing a YouTube video to blogging about it. We then rate the metrics in terms of both engagement (how much effort a user puts in to an activity) and longevity (how long the effect of that activity it lasts):

Out of this you can start seeing how one might go about selecting the right metrics to best reflect the difference your work can make. If you are working on instant incidental awareness or viral spread, you can focus towards the bottom left, and if you’d push for a longer relationship-focused then you’d go for the top right where the numbers are smaller but the time and dedication greater. Of course, there is a lot of extra context that fits around this – sentiment, enthusiasm, trust, and existing relationships, which numbers alone cannot account for – but still we hope it helps frame better the different metrics out there and their relevance to your work.

It’s a question we get asked a lot, and despite the temptation to reply with Scott Monty’s (the head of social media for Ford) famed response – “What’s the ROI of putting your pants on in the morning?”, we usually say something more considered. We talk about how, despite the fact that we can measure the outcomes of the work that we do (and that we’re getting pretty good at it) and that we work with our clients to set meaningful KPIs at the beginning of engagements, it is still really hard to map those back to business metrics like ROI.

This is why we’re working closely with the rest of the IAB’s Social Media Council to get our research into the effectiveness of social media at a campaign level off the ground (you would not believe how hard it is to devise appropriate and affordable research methodologies to do so), and also one of the reasons we’re active participants at MeasurementCamp.

However, those that tell you can’t measure anything are wrong. If you’d like to know more, Jon ‘yongfook’ Cockle has a great presentation and accompanying blog post that outlines an approach to measurement that pretty much mirrors our own:

On Thursday the week before last, we were proud to host MeasurementCamp on its one year anniversary (if you’re interested in the details, Jordan Stone and Kevin Maguire have written up the event)

Billed as ‘an open source movement to make sense of social media measurement’, it sprung out of a panel discussion on measuring social media where Will McInnes and myself crossed swords on the subject, but unfortunately without bringing much enlightenment to the audience. Will, as he often does, decided something needed to be done, and MeasurementCamp was born.

As you can see from the photos above, we’ve come a long way since the original Measurementcamp last April, hosted in room above the Coach and Horses pub in Soho. This time, we invited our friend Josh Hallett of Voce Communications who was over from the US, and as result it looks like MeasurementCamp has now turned into a global movement. We think that’s a pretty fitting birthday present…

Some of us weren’t lucky enough to get a chance to meet ‘la crème de la crème’ of social media at SXSW, but after my first day at the Marketing 2.0 Conference in Paris, I feel that I’ve had the chance to mingle with some of the top social media and marketing people. Shame the WiFi was non-existent once again at a French conference - I guess US folks must think WiFi hasn’t been invented yet in France!

But back to the conference, the impressive list of speakers and what this first day was all about. Much was said about the fact that people trust their peers more than they trust brands or advertising. Scott Monty at Ford, Alex Hunter at Virgin and Georges-Edouard Dias at L’Oreal all insisted on that notion and went into the details on what this meant for their company and the notion of ‘conversation’ was once again on everyone’s mind.  For Scott Monty at Ford, conversation is indeed what it all comes down to: social media is an opportunity to prove to individuals that you’re listening to them; it’s about building a relationship with people and humanising the company. For Charlie Schick, at Nokia,  the web is a conversation channel and brands must participate in conversations.

What’s interesting from our point of view at We Are Social is that the concept of conversation is clearly emerging – when Robin and Nathan set up We Are Social and established it as a ‘conversation agency’, it was in some way ‘groundbreaking’.  It now looks like the Forrester Connected Agency report’s predictions that ‘facilitating conversations for its clients will become the new role of an agency’ is now a reality, which is great for us as a business as more and more brands will understand the importance of being conversational. And clearly when Charlie Schick at Nokia explains that social media is the voice of a brand, this really reflects what we do for Skype: not only do we help them with strategic consultancy and social media monitoring, but we are also the voice of Skype: my colleague Peter is Skype’s blogger and he’s also @PeteratSkype on Twitter, managing their reputation online through conversation. Similarly, the This is Now campaign for the Ford Fiesta we’ve been working on for the last 6 months has all been about the conversations we’ve created.

But back to my favourite word for 2009: ROI… If social media is about building relationships with people and engaging in conversations in social media, how, as a brand, you measure your ROI? As an agency we have a fairly advanced approach, but I guess I was interested to hear about how these brands approached it. I very much like Scott Monty’s answer: ROI is very much a campaign-based approach vs. a long term commitment and an opportunity to build a relationship with people. And he went further and added “What’s the ROI of putting your pants on in the morning?”, along with a joke about how campaign-based ROI can be measured through HITS: How Idiots Track Success. Nevertheless, in real life, and especially in this period of recession, we know that ROI is important to clients but it’s great to see brands are taking a longer term interest with building relationship with people. Olivier Hascoat at MySpace insisted on that concept again: ‘stop campaigning and make a long term commitment’.

All in all, a very promising first day! As I’m publishing this, Day 2 has started and it’s already looking as exciting…