Outcomes For Social Media Measurement

Adrian Chan's post about social media types caused me to wonder what I might have to say in response. Adrian's post demonstrated clearly for me how each discipline brings its own approach to social media.

Recently through observation I've noticed that several organizations are using sentiment to identify blogger posts on the web in order to respond to those bloggers.

That observation started me thinking about the concept of influencer marketing, the process of identifying important bloggers in a community who are influencers because companies believe that by pitching or engaging those bloggers a company will gain traffic and leads, if they write an article on their blog.

I think the discussion about influencer marketing is about determining who should be targeted in the new world of blogging and social media, and really depends on the goals of an organization. If you are wondering how you can get more ink, and content on other people's websites, then you seem to be thinking about influencer marketing.

However, if your goal is to respond to customers and people on the web who have negative or positive things to say about your company, then the approach to targeting bloggers is often entirely different. Sentiment appears to be the method used if your company's goal is customer service or public affairs when your organization has resources devoted to monitoring customers and commentators. I don't know exactly, but my sense is that if you write something negatively about a company, an organization is much more likely to respond, especially if the writer of a negative posts was a customer.

The outcome that people want is the starting place for ideas about measurement in social media. For any measurement of social media, maybe the question we should all ask ourselves is “what's the outcome people want?”

Here are three outcomes that come to mind:

Good social interaction design – social media user types
Ask important bloggers to write about your company - influencer marketing
Respond to customers and bloggers who are writing negative or positive things about your company – sentiment measurement