Social Media Measurement

Originally published on The New Group blog on 1.25.08

Blogs posts, conversations within social networks and threads of dialogue in message boards, all of this online content represents a potential gold mine to gain deeper insight regarding what people really think about our brands, products and services. As marketers we’re fortunate to have a number of analytical tools available to us today that allow for measurement of conversations occurring across these different social media channels. This is exciting, powerful stuff that offers up many opportunities to gather strategic intelligence that we can weave back into our marketing, branding and advertising initiatives. Generally speaking most brands have passionate devotees as well as a few critics.

Previous to the availability of social media tracking and analytical tools, mining the conversations around a brand was a laborious if not impossible task, today the landscape is much different. Current social media measurement tools offer great opportunities to tap into the conversations occurring around brands, identify people who are influential in these conversations, understand the sentiment that is being expressed and ultimately devise strategies by which to reach out and engage with these individuals and communities in ways that can create positive word-of-mouth momentum, often multiplying the effect of other advertising and marketing programs.

Recently at The New Group we’ve been getting deep with a number of the latest tools that are pretty interesting and offer the ability to mine deeply into and target conversations happening in blogs, social networks, discussion boards and other online spaces. The way these tools work is often similar to a search engine in that you specify query terms or keywords, particular phrases you want to show up in posts as well as other conditions to focus your research.

What’s important to consider up front is the breadth and depth of conversations you’re looking to surface. Thinking this through will save you time from searching through too many off topic conversations…because in the end you still must do some reading of the posts, so knowing how to intelligently focus your queries is pretty important! Something else I’m pretty excited about is the ability to visualize the conversational landscape around a particular topic. Through social maps we can see the relationships between people engaged in a conversation and also get a sense for the reach of each participant’s voice.

I could go on about cool features of social media measurement tools…maybe in another post, but for now I’d like to suggest that if you’re embarking on a social media strategy, remember to keep your mind open to learning something new because you just might find a nugget of insight that you could have never anticipated.