Richard Pasewark, President of Kantar Media Cymfony, on how to get the most out of monitoring
Social media has emerged as an essential communication and entertainment vehicle in the modern online world. Independent of user demographics, social media has become a global channel to share opinions, feelings, and experiences, and to relate with friends, acquaintances and those with similar interests. Marketers have seen this trend, understand its importance and are expending resources to participate in it. And with this investment comes the question: what value does this bring?
In search of that answer, marketers are investing in social media listening solutions to create practices to generate insights about consumer’s interests, preferences, and experiences and develop a consistent measurement framework to validate and track a brand's presence in social media.
The first item can deliver unique value by providing brand and business insights which guide product, packaging, price and promotion. It helps marketers understand how consumers engage with products in the purchasing cycle and supports decisions about consumer outreach. The second item provides the baseline to measure brand presence and impact of social media on critical success factors for marketers.
Whether or not a marketing team is actively participating in social media conversations, it is essential for brand managers to identify and measure social media presence on a continuous basis. This framework will provide measurements related to consumer conversation, competitive share, and message resonance. It also provides data on how programs and promotions are performing and how the online relationship with consumers is evolving.
To develop and launch such a framework, marketers need to determine which data to measure and track, such as volume of discussion, sentiment, share of voice, reach, or top sites. The data will vary based on product and market and the tools available in each organization. However, the following key measurements and approaches have been effective for many of our clients:
• Volume
Often, the number of mentions or social media posts is not overly informative. Instead, volume trends used as comparison points against competitors and market events (eg a new product launch) can be valuable for understanding direction and momentum.
• Sentiment
The same holds true for sentiment ratings. Debating whether an individual post was positive, neutral or negative may not bring much value. Many of our customers prefer to use net tonality scores to indicate weighted shifts in consumer views.
• Influence
• Measuring influence goes beyond counting 'likes' or followers. For our clients, we deploy an influence matrix to synthesize various reach metrics to understand which sites, authors and posts have a greater impact.
• Audience
Most organisations market to multiple audiences and demographics and looking at all social media conversation will provide mixed results. Thus, metrics must be refined for target audiences, regions, or social media channels (eg microblogs v forums) to derive more accurate audience measures.
The exact measures used by an organisation will depend on its particular goals. Business analysts can help define and refine metrics that are applied to measure programme success, understand customer preferences and support a wide variety of business decisions. Increasingly, as marketers and tools become more sophisticated in measuring social media, this data is integrated with other research and included in a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) in the marketer’s toolkit.
We are increasingly helping our customers apply social media measurement and analysis by incorporating other data sources which provide demographic information as a complement to social consumer and brand measurement. With this integration, marketing professionals can correlate the type and location of social media conversation with analysis of the audience and site behavior which aids in making more informed decisions on their marketing programs and budget allocations.
Ultimately, the promise of social media measurement and analysis will be realised when consistent measurements, tied to client business decisions, and integrated with other relevant data sources, provides a more complete and addressable view on consumer preferences and actions.