The Three Dimensions of Social Media ROI
Flickr Photo: zadro
Beth Kanter and NTEN have spent almost a whole year working on the We Are Media project, and we've learned a few important things. Chief among them: return on investment is really hard to determine. It's a three-dimensional picture, but we've been trying to render it in two-dimensional tools.
If you've worked on any sort of campaign, you know there are three key pieces to creating change:
- Mobilizing your base to take action
- Recruiting new people to your base
- Inserting your message into the popular debate
All campaigns are, in essence, a numbers game. Your annual fundraising or advocacy efforts are no different: you need a certain part of your base to respond, you need to bring a certain number of new supporters to your organization, and you need to be viewed as an authority in your area.
Tracking the first part is easy, whether you're using direct mail, TV ads, email, or your blog. Get your message out, then determine how many people respond by visiting your site and taking action (or sending their response card in with a check). We've become adept at this kind of tracking in the sector. We know what our open and response rates typically are and use them to determine which efforts are working to mobilize our base, and which are not.
Tracking the second part is harder, but we can create systems to at least approximate where new supporters come from. We can track forwards in emails, use source codes on mailings, and drive traffic to special web pages to help us understand which strategies bring us new supporters, and which aren't worth the effort.
The real challenge lies in the third part. To win, you need to be more than right, you need to be influential. And influence is hard to measure. If you're trying to build buzz around your campaign, you can't just aim to get a lot of links to your site -- you have to get the right people to link to your site, and they have to do it the right way. That's the third dimension.
Let's say you create a video with the aim of changing the way Americans think about Muslims. At the end of the video, you ask viewers to sign a petition at your site. How would you measure the ROI of the video?
- Mobilizing your base: You can easily compare the petition signers to your house file to know how many people from your base take action. Done.
- Recruiting new people: People who sign the petition and are NOT in your house file are new recruits. Done.
- Influence: Well, you can track a couple of things pretty easily. You can track how many times the video is viewed, and you can track how many other people link to or post the video. Done? No: that just measures quantity, the line between your organization and a blog post with your video in it. You need to follow the lines between that blog post and everywhere else it goes. You need the third dimension.
- Popularity of the sites/people that talk about your video. Can they reach a lot of people?
- Tone of their discussion about your video. Are they agreeing with you or disparaging you?
- Influence of the sites/people talking about your video. Are they sharing your video with your target audience?
There are some emerging companies working their way toward tracking this third dimension of social media ROI. Radian6, Brandwatch, SentimentMetrics, and others can report a lot about this third dimension, though they can be pricey. Another newer company that has taken up the challenge is Morningside Analytics. They've got some interesting little tools, including one that lets you track the influence of various political videos.
Using these tools, we can start to make more informed decisions about which social media tools to use and who we need to engage. The data is out there -- we just need better tools to pull it all into focus.
P.S. - Check out these really cool 3D photos from Zadro on Flickr. If you happen to have any 3D glasses lying round, they're way cool! Or, you can build your own glasses.
