WeAreMedia Module 6: What are the best blogs, books, and other resources to guide our thinking about Social Media Metrics, ROI, and Nonprofits?
This week in WeAreMedia, we're focused on Return on Investment. Earlier this week, I asked folks to have fun with Social Media ROI Mad Libs. Holly Ross at NTEN put this one together for their blogging strategy:
NTEN is implementing a social media strategy that includes BLOGGING. The key benefits are:
- INCREASED website traffic overall
- BETTER search engine rankings
- MORE conversation with and between NTEN Members
- It's an easy CHANNEL for saying things we think are important
- ESTABLISHES and MAINTAINS the voice/personality of our organization
- EVALUATES community opinions/interest by how often certain posts are read or commented on
As Holly notes in her post, identifying the benefits is easier than actually measuring the return -- even using a very simple financial calculation:
(Time & Money Saved + Money Earned) - (Time & Money In) = ROI
I think it would be unfair and misguided to evaluate the success or failure
of a technology project based on a single financial measure. It leads people to thinking that there is one way to measure and one
measurement. ROI should collect measures related to efficiency which are tangible benefits, but also
effectiveness which end up being intangible
benefits. Intangible benefits do not easily translate into an objective, quantifiable number.
Ah, those intangible benefits that we can identify related to social media, that are difficult to justify to an executive director, and impossible to quantify. It can lead us to wonder whether it is
all waste of time because there is no ROI.
Let's remember - Gilbs Law
"Anything can be measured in a way that is superior to not measuring it at all"
Tom Gibb is an engineer and measurement geek. He asks, should do we just ignore intangibles in all of this thinking? Do we attempt quantify them? Or we just describe them and don't bother to quantify?
He talks about quantifying love which, of course, you can't do. But the process of discussing the measures does lead to insights and understanding of the value. So, if one looks at the social media investment, identifies the intangible and tangible benefits,
and through discussion identified the attributes, this might lead to
some quantification of the value and understanding of intangible values.
- Determining a technology investment's value means quantifying costs and benefits
- Some benefits are intangible and may or may not be quantified. When attempting to quantify intangibles, important to obtain consensus among decision-makers about what constitutes a meaningful measurement.
- Sometimes hard to claim that investments in social media alone resulted in the improved client service or whatever. One solution is to identify the cause and effect chain between the capabilities identified by the technology. This requires conversation with others or staff - not only to gather the data necessary to establish the chain, but obtain their agreement on the technology's contribution to the mission or program improvement.
- To quantify intangibles look and listen. See if there are published tangible payoffs from others and collect these "data nuggets" because they add credibility to your analysis.
- Consider setting up a "benefits discovery" brainstorming session of 10-15 people who are knowledgeable about the areas that will experience the largest impacts.
To round out the module, we want to put together an awesome list of Social Media ROI blogs, books, and other resources. What are the best resources to guide our thinking?
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