New Metrics: Some Tools for Plotting a Social Media Strategy

Last week, in Part One of this series, I laid out three social media metrics that organizations can use to begin gauging share of the social media conversation, tone of the social media conversation, and share and tone trends over time.  Once you gain an understanding of your place in the social media world, you can build an informed plan for becoming an active social media participant.   

In the three step process to involving your organization in social media (listen, measure, engage), last week's metrics will help you begin to build some useful data sets through listening and measuring. This week, let's focus on engaging in social media. 

There has been ample conversation and publication about various levels of social media engagement and their effectiveness for organizations.  Because many of the organizations I work with are just beginning to participate in social media, I've adopted an amalgamated hierarchy of social media participation.  This sliding scale of engagement has become a very useful tool for helping our client companies understand more clearly how their participation, and the desired results derived from said participation, can steadily improve.  Let's dive right in.

1.  Lights Off

I heard anecdotally this week that up to 66 percent of large consumer companies in the U.S. have yet to participate in any social media.  Some organizations believe that social media is a passing fad.  If you're in that camp, you might consider my August 21 column on the new shift in how people are communicating.  For others, the seeming complexity of social media opportunities and threats, coupled with a lack of understanding about how engagement can be successfully measured, are enough to keep them out of the game.  Whatever the reason, organizations that have yet to enter the social media game are being left out of a growing, useful set of public relations and marketing tools.

2.  Head In The Sand

So, you're monitoring social media for keywords and conversations about your organization and when something positive is posted, you respond in kind.  On the other hand, if a negative conversation pops up somewhere, you ignore it and hope it will go away.  It's a common behavioral response.  At Redirect, we call it institutional disconnect.  For years, traditional media has allowed companies to spend money promoting a positive brand or product message.  With enough purchasing power, it was possible to advertise through criticism and negative response.  In social media, the perceived value of an idea, product, or activity derives and grows from collective opinion that is less informed by marketing and more informed by trusted sources of information.  That's why social media can be a great equalizer of small and large organizations and brands.  Each has the same opportunity to tell a story.  If the story, and by extension the product or brand, offers value, then people will promote it of their own volition.

It's an old story by now, but not too long ago a leading consumer technology brand practicing this approach completely ignored an angry rant about quality by an up-to-then unknown blogger.  The end result?  News of the rant spread, others chimed in with similar complaints, and over a million unique Internet users read the original post.  Sales for the products in question took a sharp nosedive, and it took over a year to turn the sales trend back in the right direction.

3.  Life Is Always Lovely

Organizations engaging at this level are monitoring the conversation, but have yet to develop and pursue a useful plan for participating in the social media conversation.  When organizations engaged at this level do participate, it is often with inappropriate responses to what's being said.  

Example:  John Doe posts a tweet, "Just tried the new Brand X cereal today.  Ugh.  I feel like I need to shave my tongue."

The Brand X response:  "Thanks for your great insight.  We're glad you're enjoying the cereal, it's so healthy for you.  Tell all your friends! "

Because success in social media depends on authenticity, transparency, and demonstrating that you really are listening, this type of blanket response pattern can be deleterious to your organization.  Remember, social media is valuable because it allows companies to talk to their stakeholders and customers in a responsive, informed way.  Throwing the product or brand message at any and all comments can erode your online credibility pretty fast.

4.  You Don't Know What You're Talking About

Don't make the mistake of telling every critic that he or she is wrong.  If all of your social media conversations are arguments about why someone else is wrong and your company is right, you're missing the point of social media.  Again, this response behavior is a throwback to the old One-To-Many model of marketing and promotion.  In social media, you can't throw out your marketing message on a regular basis without taking into account, and responding more appropriately to, alternative points of view.

Almost everyone has had a bad customer service experience.  You decide to purchase something (dinner, a new DVD, some tires, whatever) and the transaction is unsatisfactory.  If you're like most of the people I know, you'll probably just chalk it up to the rigors of daily consumer life and determine not to purchase goods or services from the source in question again.  Of course, if the experience is remarkably bad, or maybe infuriating, you might complain to someone.  Most of the time, though, consumers who endure an unsatisfactory experience leave the company and the company never knows why.  Social media is a chance for organizations to understand when something goes wrong and hopefully make it right.  Pay attention, and engage accordingly.

5.  Superficial Response

Superficial responders allow for criticism in the social media conversation, but they don't use the criticism and feedback to make a positive change or, more important, solve the critic's need.  This is the social media equivalent of a crappy customer service department.  My colleague Margaret Nathan of Strategic Communications argues that poor customer service and inefficient, inept consumer response by organizations are developing a new kind of customer who jumps right past the consumer representative and heads for the PR department.  Social media is fueling the shift.  Before social media, you had to rely on some other mode of authority to affect a situational change.  Now, if we have a bad experience or unmet need, and the service or product provider of our choice doesn't respond satisfactorily, we can tell the whole world in 140 characters or less.  

6.  Fully Engaged

The best social media practitioners are those who listen, measure, and then engage in a manner that acknowledges criticism, acts on expressed problems to resolve them, and thanks positive conversation and commentary.  Then, they go one step further.  They take the information they acquire via social media and use it to make better strategic decisions.  Remember, social media is an opportunity to connect with your key stakeholders in ways that are meaningful to them.  By listening to what people are saying, you can respond in a direct and useful manner as well as glean critical information for making key decisions about organizational strategies.  Companies spend untold sums of money each year trying to find out what people think about them and their products and services.  Surveys and sample groups, for example, have long been highly-regarded tools for understanding the moods and opinions of various populations.  Social media can't, and shouldn't, supplant these and other tools entirely in driving objectives, but it is a valuable and growing weapon in a successful communications arsenal.

In July, Seeking Alpha dot Com published a fantastic story about the ten most socially engaged international brands.  The conclusion?  Effective social media engagement can be directly tied to financial success, and organizations that practice this type of engagement are reaping great rewards.

It's a compelling story.  Be a part of it.

Brian Seethaler is hopelessly devoted to outdoor pursuits, Helvetica, and the Oxford Comma.  He is also the managing director at Redirect Community, director of sponsorship for the Social Media Club of Salt Lake City, and an adjunct instructor at the University of Utah's Division of Continuing Education where he teaches social networking.  Catch him online at twitter.com/seethaler or facebook.com/seethaler.