Mar 9th, 2010 |
“Awesome. We have 716 visits this month, and 4 people just retweeted us.”
“How much more revenue are we going to see from this as a result?”
“I have no idea. But someone liked our Facebook status.”
If this snippet of conversation hit a little too close to home, this is the blog post for you:
Diving into social media is a great idea if you know how to swim around. But what’s the point of blogging and tweeting and updating statuses and adding connections if you can’t measure the ROI?
Sean Power and Alistair Croll of Watching Websites are here to help analyze your social media strategy with their Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco Intensive, “Applied Communilytics.” Sean recently spoke to us about communilytics (a mashup of “community” and “analytics”) to preview the content you’ll find in his Intensive.
(You can also check out his post-Web 2.0 Expo New York 2009 interview with an attendee.)
Kaitlin: Successful businesses base most important decisions on cold hard numbers. But when it comes to social media, many companies haven’t yet applied this wisdom to their efforts. Instead they casually throw up a Facebook Fan Page or tweet about a product. If you were given the chance to scare someone straight and preach why analytics is important (how convenient – you have that chance right now), what case study would you cite to show what horrors can happen when you don’t pay attention to Communilytics?
Sean: I’m not sure I’d like to explicitly call out a company that failed to mitigate an issue in its social media efforts (like the Motrin Mom fiasco, for example), but rather concentrate on all the good that can happen when you actually do listen and react. Late last month, the gay clothing and lifestyle company Fabulis had their Citibank accounts frozen because someone at Citi had reviewed the Fabulis blog and erroneously marked it as porn. Though this could’ve resulted in a massive PR nightmare for Citi, the company was quick to respond to the incident, revise their policies and issue a letter of apology to Fabulis – doing so transparently and openly. The first step to communilytics is listening, and Citi’s listening efforts allowed them to mitigate a potential brand disaster.
Kaitlin: In your Intensive, you’re going to cover “applied communilytics on a shoestring.” Can you give me a preview how to do this or what sites you can use? Conversely, what’s the most expensive thing about communilytics?
Sean: The most expensive thing about communilytics is the time it can take when you’re not doing it right. There are many great vendors that help gather community analytics, but it can quickly suck a massive amount of time in a day when you’re trying to compare different data points without a clear end goal in mind. Communilytics efforts are about using little bits and pieces of analytics practices in order to understand how you’re achieving your business goals. We’ll talk about how to save time and money by learning to ask the right questions, and not waste your time looking at numbers that don’t bring you closer to success.
Kaitlin: At the end of your Intensive, you guys are teaming up with Eric Ries, who is running the other Intensive – Lean Startup. I read this article of his a while ago and really enjoyed it. Do you agree with Eric that some metrics may just be ego boosters? How can a marketer turn that around and make it useful?
Sean: The only numbers that matter are numbers that bring you closer to your business goals. These numbers are generally not ones that make you say “That’s interesting.” only to walk away. They’re numbers that make you say “we need to change feature X as a result of what we just learned”. They’re numbers that paint a picture or story that you can act on. To turn numbers around and make them useful, marketers need to know what their goals are, and which numbers allow them to track the state of those goals.
Kaitlin: In my interview with you last year, you talked about the importance of forming a hypothesis around one’s marketing efforts, then testing them. Should community managers and marketers approach social media the way a scientist would approach a study? What process should they use?
Sean: Part of social media efforts is simply making sure you come to the party and bring your party face. The other part revolves around creating compelling stories that people at the party might like, in hopes that they’re going to want to learn more about you (or even buy stuff from you!). Social media should be thought as a marketing channel instead of a separate entity. With this in mind, many of the same processes used in marketing channels (email, direct, etc) can be applied to social media, including the use of analytics and goal tracking.
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If you’d like to see more about Communilytics, you can watch a preview of Sean and Alistair’s O’Reilly Master Class on the subject. Or watch Alistair talk shop about how Twitter followers propagate information:
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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.
