Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

The Struggle To Measure Social Media Effectiveness

Rachel Happe has a good post about how to look at the value part of social media ROI equation.  She identifies some good questions to get at defining the value:

- What is the value of having a better conversation?
- What is the value of meeting someone?
- What is the value of getting more accurate information faster?
- What is the value of being able to drive consensus around an idea faster?
- What is the value of building trust?
- What is the opportunity cost of not innovating?

I would have liked to have added these questions to the Social Media ROI Case Study Slam panel, maybe for future reiterations.   I'd like to see variations on the Justin Perkin's Social Media ROI Calculator to incorporate some of those.

Rachel goes on to say, that "The things he can measure easily (activity) are not the things that provide insight into the real value to the organization."  Ah, yes, was going to ask about the intangibles.  She points to EMC blogger talking about the difficulty of measurement.  Doesn't sound too much different from nonprofit or not?

At some point, our free ride will come to an end.  The company will realize they're spending a big chunk of change on this stuff, and there will be a clear need to formalize metrics around the paybacks we're getting from a multi-headed investment.

But, I'm not quite sure what we'll measure, or how we'll measure it.  Some real work will need to be done around an "E2.0" balanced scorecard, and how well we're doing against it.  And, I don't think anyone has really done this yet, as far as I know.

Sure, we're poking around with "buzz measurement" tools, and anyone can capture page views, but I keep thinking we're missing the real value of having people meaningfully engage with each other. 

Sometimes, I think we're trying to measure a great conversation, or a wonderful party.  The qualitiative aspects seem to outweigh the quantitative ones.   Sure, we could construct a quantitative case, but that'd miss the point of what's turning out to really matter.

 

Rachel has a page listing social media metrics.

Are there any nonprofits that use KPI? (Key Performance Indicators?)

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This slideshow caught my eye.  It's about the difference between KPI and Metrics.  I discovered key performance indicators while researching the Google Analytics Screencast.   I jumped down the rabbit hole of KPIs and read everything by Eric T Peterson who is the founder of a company called, Web Analytics Demystified. Some of his books include:  Web Analytics Demystified, Web Site Measurement Hacks and The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators.   

Peterson defines KPI as "numbers designed to succinctly convey as much information as possible. Good key performance indicators are well defined, well presented, create expectations and drive actions."    Now .. I'm interested in the best practices around using KPI and Peterson's book is a fantastic resource.  I thinking about what is translatable to nonprofits and organizations that have smaller budgets than Fortune 500 Companies used as examples in the books.

Social Media ROI Case Study Slam Panel at 08NTC: Carie Lewis, Human Society

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Notes

ABOUT ME
My name is Carie and I’m the Internet Marketing Manager for The Humane Society of the United States.
I run the org’s web 2.0 and online advertising campaigns.
I love animals and I love the internet, and I’m a self-proclaimed social networking junkie.

ABOUT THE ORG
The HSUS is the nation’s largest and most powerful animal protection organization.
Our mission is “celebrating animals, confronting cruelty.”
We’ve been responsible for bringing animal cruelty and animal welfare related issues into the media spotlight and on the minds of average Americans.

WHY THIS CAMPAIGN
What Vick did was a horrible thing, and dogfighting is a dispicable crime. It’s now a felony in all 50 states
But this case brought dogfighting into the spotlight and raised awareness to people that may have never heard of it before.
Since this brought dogfighting into the spotlight and put it on the minds of many Americans, we figured it was a good time to reach out to people.

WHY THIS CAMPAIGN
People were buzzing about the issue online and obviously outraged by their comments. We could tell by all the comments and images floating around.
We wanted to take that energy and give people an outlet to express their feelings about michael vick and dogfighting in general.
We wanted to be creative and capitalize on the media attention to bring dogfighting into the spotlight.
We wanted low cost and high impact

WHAT CAMPAIGN
In the middle of the Vick dogfighting drama, we launched a UGC campaign called the “Knock Out Animal Fighting YouTube Contest”
An Integrated campaign using website, email, social networking, video sharing, TV

PROCESS - contest
Asked people to go to our website to learn about the contest
Create videos about how they and their pets felt about dogfighting
Then, they uploaded it as a video response to our dogfighting video and filled out our submission form

PROCESS - contest
We picked a winner and also allowed people to vote for their favorite, generating a people’s choice winner
This gave people who didn’t or werent able to participate by creating a video a way to be engaged – important with higher-engagement leveled UGC campaigns

PROCESS - marketing
Email
Website
Social networks
Web badges
Blogger outreach

OUTCOMES
Both tangible & intangible
Increase list members (we don’t spend money on online marketing unless its tied to a donation, advo, or other list building campaign. That way can recoup the $ spent and justify time spent. Great thing about online marketing – trackable
Raise awareness – youtube video views
Get original contest – videos
Encourage engagement - # of votes for people’s choice award. High engagement contest – to be able to make a video – engaged in issue and also have equipment

OUTCOMES - tangible
Number of video submissions
Number of new list members from video / voting page advo (worth = $3 per list member)
Number of page views to the winners announcement on HSUS.org
Number of votes for people’s choice award
Number of youtube video views of winning submission

MEASUREMENT TOOLS - tangible
Sourced links for new list names from marketing – to quantify ROI
Page views from our stats program & Video view count from youtube – to quantify exposure
Time spent on page & Vote count from poll program – to quantify engagement

PROCESS / STRATEGY
Measuring buzz
-link love – google syntax to show you who’s linking to you
-referring URLs in stats program
-google rss alerts (can be set to daily, as it happens, etc.) – good for time-sensitive response (answer questions, defense, etc)
-do a regular google search for related terms
- Pr / newspaper coverage
Friend recruitment (TAF)
- bulletin reposts on myspace
Not just number, but quality of blogslook at technorati and alexa rankings

PROCESS / STRATEGY
Top 10 referrers were all from mail programs – aol and yahoo
Indicates that people were forwarding in order to share

MEASUREMENT TOOLS - intangible
# blogs / websites mentions and links
# comments on social networks / blogs
# related inquiries
# RSS subscribers (n/a)
Rating of youtube video
Comment content
Keywords leading to page to define interests
Referring sites (count, quality) to find out where people are coming from
Friend request / commenting trends in relation to other activities

WHAT I LEARNED FROM THIS CAMPAIGN - GOOD
people’s choice involvement
Timing w/ media
Using youtube – technical support on their end, cost effective, mainstream venue, increasing video views (it was on the homepage)

WHAT DO THE NUMBERS MEAN?
How do you know if it was successful? If the numbers are good? If it was worth your time?
Time spent = amount of outreach compared to number of venues
We do not use a formula to determine if a social media campaign was successful. We also do not track time – everything is an estimate.
Did you build a relationship with a blogger that will cover your stuff in the future?
Media coverage - Tv, blogs, newspapers

Was it worth it?Youtube UGC – yes – we had to start somewhere
Made a TV PSA that otherwise we would have had to pay to get an agency to do.
We learned - were running a flickr contest right now that takes lessons learned from wendys and has been successful.

KEY TAKEAWAYS ABOUT ROI, MEASUREMENT, and METRICS for nonprofits using social media
If you or your boss are stuck on time spent ROI, track as you go.
Pick one link and market it for consistency – will be easier to track – use a vanity URL. and have all resources available (related press release, web story, etc.)
One person to know where all the moving parts can be brought together to evaluate in the end. Also helps for communicating with UGC contestants and winners.
Disclose policies in contest rules - this is the easiest way to incorporate list building in UGC campaigns is to disclose that all entrants will be auto added to your email list and can unsubscribe at any time.
Next time, we’re thinking of having a celebrity judge so that we can collaborate with them and generate more excitement about submissions.
Most of my time was spent doing contest logistics since this was our first contest. Next time put more time into creating buzz.

The complete panel notes can be found here.

 

Social Media ROI Case Study Slam Panel at 08NTC: ROI of Listening, Wendy Harmon, Red Cross

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ROI of Listening

NTC Presentation Notes
3.20.2008

Slide 1
Introduction: Even liberal arts kids can measure. It’s not all about math. You can measure stories and connections through documentation, too.

Slide 2
American Red Cross background: Post Katrina, ARC knew there were negative blog posts about it but had no capacity to respond or even monitor. Hired social media integrator to “combat” bloggers and to increase organizational transparency.

Slide 3
Listening is the What: First order of business to get handle on existing conversation. Hundreds of mentions across social media platforms each day. Exponential increase in times of disaster, nature, man-made and PR varieties. We monitor and track all of it, and respond to a lot of it.

Slide 4
Why We Listen : ARC wanted to correct misinformation, to be informed about public opinion, to track conversation trends, to identify influencers, to create relationships.

Slide 5
Outcome of Listening:
Successfully correcting misinformation
Able to track conversation trends (for example, know that most people who post about blood donation also mention type of cookie they receive afterwords – this informs advertising, PR outreach to increase blood donations)
Instead of “combating” bloggers, found most are passionate and positive and want to help, so now engaging them and giving them tools to tell their stories on big platform.

Slide 6
Outcome of Listening:
ADOPTION: Sharing social media mentions internally is increasing ARC employee social media adoption
CUSTOMER SERVICE: Compiled data for each line of service (Blood, Disaster Response, International Services, Health & Safety, Service to Armed Forces, Preparedness) with info regarding various aspects of customer service and the “end user experience.”
STRATEGY: Able to inform PR strategy example: J&J sues ARC for trademark infringement, monitoring real time mentions informed immediate strategy.

Slide 7
Listening Process Step 1: The search
Not rocket science – just keyword search across social media platforms, lots of em (Technorati for blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Terraminds, Facebook, etc).
If have special circumstance, use special additional keywords to track. For example, did lots of J&J searches during first days of trademark lawsuit.

Slide 8
Listening Process Step 2: Blog Update
Cull all of the daily mentions into a daily update email that’s distributed widely to internal ARC audience.
Compile by line of service and/or subject matter, depending on day’s news.
Note which posts I need help answering, consult with subject matter experts.
Generally keeps everyone abreast of daily conversation.

Slide 9
Listening Process Step 3: Response
Determine who will get a response, whether it’s a thanks or something that needs fixing/addressing.
Spend time reading, watching, or looking at the other content before responding.
Use judgment in avenue of response: email, comment, or leave it alone.

Slide 10
Listening Process Step 4: Tagging
Tag all posts mentioned in the Daily Blog Update by line of service and other appropriate keywords
Over time, evaluate areas where people find their intersection with the Red Cross to be compelling enough to post about publicly.
Good for tracking past outreach

Slide 11
Listening Process Step 5: Reporting
Send monthly update of aggregated conversation data categorized by line of service or disaster or big event
J&J example: We watched mentions to determine where various industries stood so we’d know whether to back off or continue our aggressive PR push to shame them into dropping the suit.

Slide 12
Listening Metric: Authority
Use # of readers and tools like Technorati authority to determine influence of mentions.
Authority matters but is not everything. Sometimes most compelling story or most pressing issue comes from social media user with smallest influence.

Slide 13
Listening Metric: Anecdotal Evidence
Internal Feedback
“The blog update helps me do my job better.”
“Makes me feel more connected to our stakeholders.”
“Helped me understand the power of social media.”
External Feedback
Most one-on-one outreach results in positive public response
“I’m glad to see you here”
“Thanks for reading!”
“You really helped me.”
“Great to interact with a human being over there.”
Write it down!
Document all of the anecdotal evidence of return on investment and keep it in one spot so you can easily grab it when questioned.

Slide 14
Challenges to Measuring ROI of Listening
ARC is stodgy and slow to change. Lots of baby steps are necessary for organization-wide adoption of social media.
Culture shift is huge for this organization. It is happening, but slowly.

Slide 15
Challenges to Measuring ROI of Listening
Firewall. Only a handful of employees are able to access ANY social media sites.
If more employees were able to view and interact, impact of listening would be MUCH broader.
BUT – with some of the evidence here, I’ve nearly convinced senior leadership of need for opening access.

Slide 16
Successes in Measuring ROI of Listening
By documenting the conversation, created value. Everyone wants the feedback now.
Documenting successful one-on-one outreach with stakeholders lays groundwork for future social media campaigns.
Taking the baby step of listening has made the case for integrating appropriate social media tools in all ARC communications – opening the door to 2 way communications department instead of one way.

Slide 17
Successes in Measuring ROI of Listening
By reading and reaching out, created external value as a listener. Send message that you matter as a stakeholder by taking time to listen and incorporate your ideas.
Achieving higher degree of transparency.

Slide 18
Key Learnings in Measuring ROI of Listening
Listening is a gateway drug to increased social media adoption
Easy to aggregate conversations into data to recommend systemic change and to inform organization of trends and possible strategies.
Don’t forget the little guys – they can become passionate influencers with continued relationship building.

Social Media ROI Case Study Slam Panel at 08NTC: Eve Smith, Easter Seals

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The following is from an NTC 08 Panel called "Social Media ROI Case Study Slam" that I designed and facilitated at NTC.  Here are Eve's slides and her notes.

Hi, I'm Eve Smith, Assistant Director of Interactive Marketing at Easter Seals. I manage our online fundraising campaigns and integrated projects to attract new supporters and donors.

I’m going to share with you what we learned from participating in the recent Facebook Causes Challenge – as I was telling my colleagues before coming to NTEN, this is my “do as I say, not as I do” presentation.

Many of you may have heard of Easter Seals – we’ve been around for nearly 90 years providing help, hope and answers to children and adults with autism and other disabilities and support to the families who love them. We have a network of 80 affiliates in the United States, Puerto Rico and Australia.
When you think of Easter Seals, you may not immediately think of us on Facebook. But we’re there.

Like many of you, we learned about the Case Foundation's Giving Challenges when they were announced in December of this past year. There were 2 challenge competitions -- one with Parade Magazine and the other with Facebook Causes. Both competitions were based on attracting the most unique donors to your cause. The competitions ran from December to February.

We decided to test the waters and participate in the Facebook Causes Challenge. We thought this would be a good way to learn more about Facebook and the community.

We already had a Facebook fan page and a few causes, and we were eager to do more.

This seemed like a good opportunity. And we learned many valuable lessons along the way.

Our goals were pretty simple –

We wanted to identifying and get to know Facebook users who have an affinity with autism – We know they’ll be more likely to become our supporters and donors.

We wanted to see how well known the Easter Seals brand was in Facebook. And, we wanted to gather friends to build our cause and presence in Facebook for future messaging.

Let me just save you all the trouble in the future -- don't ever pick the last few days of a $50K challenge to compete for the daily challenge! The top fundraising orgs going for the $50K grand prize were driving up the daily totals to numbers we couldn’t compete with. 

Seems so obvious now, right, to not pick the last week of the contest for our push?

Learn from our mistake!

We published a post on our public autism blog -- they’re an audience more likely to join the cause.

Because of the tight timeframe, we decided to not solicit our house email list or engage our affiliates. We wanted to keep this a small experiment – we were really testing the concept more than anything else.

And, we know that our house file responds to email over about a three day period, so the single day challenge would have been over by the time many looked at their email.

We personally thanked supporters. But not as much as we should have – the groups who were really successful in the Challenge poked, prodded and motivated their supporters constantly, asking them to reach out to new people.

I estimate we spent about 8 hours in prep for the Cause, and about another 4-6 hours executing the campaign, responding and sending emails.

And based on the results, clearly that wasn’t enough. The results were, frankly, pretty dismal … We didn’t reach our goals or come close.

And we didn’t set a goal for gathering new friends, but we had 68 people join by the end of the 24 hour period which made us happy.

But … based on our experience, we’re on the new measurement train … and have a new way of measuring our effectiveness for these types of experiments.

For example, our Shine the Light on Autism Facebook cause keeps growing and attracting friends, even with little activity on our part. We're up to 163 members. The topic of autism has “stickiness” in Facebook and that’s a good thing for us because we’re launching a new campaign this month.

We’re also in this for the long haul – we’re not just looking for supporters for a day or a month. We want to engage with people for a long time.

We definitely learned some valuable lessons from the Facebook Causes Challenge.

One was we choose the wrong date. Clearly that was an oops.

Second, we learned it was really hard to carve out time from our very full schedules to take on this type of outreach. It was much more of a deep dive, then a toe dip, for sure.

Overall, that’s our big takeaway -- we learned that small experiments like the Facebook Causes challenge really do add up.

We're much better equipped to move ahead with a Facebook strategy than before the challenge.

We understand that its going to take a larger commitment of staff time and resources.

And that we know we weigh the risks and rewards about future experiments.

… So Whether you deep dive or just dip your toe, go ahead and test the water. I think you’ll find it’s just fine…

This is my contact information and I’d be happy to talk more about our work in Facebook and other social networks, and share what we’re learning to do, and not to do.

Thank you.

 

NTC08: Social Media ROI Case Study Slam

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I'm beginning to post the slides and detailed notes from the session at NTC08 here on my blog and on my Social Media Metrics Wikispace.   The introduction set the ground rules and offer these overview points to the what and why of social media ROI.

• What do we mean by metrics, measurement, and ROI?
  

• What are the challenges in measuring the success of social media?
  • A lot of intangibles, but they're important
  • No standardized metrics for social media (yet)
  • Not many tools to make it easy to extract data

• What's important to keep in mind?
  
  
  • Learning is important
  • While numbers are critical, it isn't all about math
  • Need to collect qualitative data re: intangibles
  • Different ways to calculate
  • You may need to do small low risk pilot to figure out what can or cannot be measured for the ROI

Social Media ROI Case Study Slam Panel at 08NTC: Danielle Brigida, NWF

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Slide 1: My name is Danielle Brigida and I work on the Operations team for National Wildlife Federation. Today I'll be talking about using Digg and Stumbleupon specifically.

Slide 2: The National Wildlife Federation is one of the largest conservation organizations in the U.S. It's part of my job to investigate the best tools for engaging potential activists and members.

Slide 3: That being said, our average member is a 65 year old woman. We are such a big tent organization that covers so many issues that we are looking for ways of broadening our audience.

Slide 4: After attending last year's NTEN, two tools stuck out for me that I really wanted to try- Digg and Stumbleupon. I had already been working for NWF on facebook and myspace but I wanted to test out more social bookmarking and networking sites.

Slide 5: I decided on these two sites because they increased page views "traffic". I was hoping that I could offer the first handshake to a new audience. I'm interested in driving traffic because I see an importance in bringing people back to NWF's site and engaging them there, instead of in another location.

Slide 6:So the first thing I tested out was Digg. Basically you submit a timely Url, summarize your content and post it under a category. It is then voted up or down. Your goal is to get your dig to "go popular", which means it gets on the highly-visible Digg homepage.

Slide 7: This is an example of an NWF submission on the digg homepage. It was quality content that interested a number of readers. Getting it on the digg homepage was the difference between getting 30 and 30,000 pageviews. .

Slide 8:  The digg going popular led to this page getting 48,500 views the month of February. The green represents the views directly coming from dig. But what you see is that the inbound links boosted the number up from the previous month.

Slide 9: Another way I chose to experiment with this network was using our blog,  Wildlife Promise. It doesn't have the readership of our website, but it served as a great playground for testing theories of what information goes popular on digg.

Slide 10:By testing what content was well-received, I was able to hit the sweet spot of digg more often.  One of the blog postings I did talked about animal tactics for surviving the cold. It went popular and drove 29,000 views to our blog in one day. You can see the bump in the graph…our blog wasn't used to this.

Slide 11: This chart further explains digg's impact. When something goes popular on digg it is picked up in a number of dig rss feeds that feed into blogs. Some bloggers will also repost dig stories as well.

Slide 12: I know I was just making it sound easy, but dig takes time. You have to build up your relationships like anything else and that's where the investment comes in. This is a chart of how many digs I got when I started in November. It steadily increased but took about an hour a day for months.

Slide 13: .I don't have a lot of time but I wanted to talk about our runner up in traffic drivers. Stumble upon is effective because it's target marketing. You discover websites and tag them to interests, and it learns what you like and brings you more.

Slide 14: Stumbleupon allows people to thumb up your site and write comments, therefore your ROI can come in forms of thumbs and comments. The more thumbs, the greater the traffic the site receives.

Slide 15: Stumble doesn't push the numbers, but it pushes the quality. Stumbleupon visitors bring people who stay on the site longer, and only had a 33% bounce rate. They visit nearly two pages of your site on average as well. Not to mention: 51% of visitors have a household income over 60k.

Slide 16: In order to invest in Stumbleupon I made a decision to really focus on quality content and sometimes that took time to find. I also made really great friendships and built relationships.
In many of these networks it's about reciprocation, and not about looking for people to do your work for you.

Slide 17: My greatest challenge with social media was finding the time. It takes around an hour a day for a while to develop relationships and build a positive reputation. But it’s not just a daily investment; it happens over time as well. Look at it as patient money*

Slide 18: Overall sites like Digg and Stumble are great for increasing your site visibility with little money. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on google ads, use these sites as a chance to push things out quickly. With a well built profile you can do a serious amount of marketing for very cheap.

Slide 19: Stumble and digg are top referrers to nwf.org and have driven 100,000 page views in the past few months. They have also brought in 95% new visits.

Slide 20: Here are the takeaways when experimenting with social media. Learn the networks (and take what you know about your organization to help you decide what will work)
Invest and reciprocate. Don't expect anything from people. Listen to feedback. Consider your niche. Never get complacent because new stuff is always coming out. And know that social media isn't the answer but it's part of the solution.

You can find the complete session notes and slides here.

Why Your Social Media or Social Fundraising Plan Should Include Success Metrics

Excellent post from Jeremiah Owyang called "Why Your Social Media Plan Should Include Success Metrics"  that shares some examples of success metrics for social media.  These look like what we in the nonprofit sector might call "short term outcomes."   I've translated his list for nonprofits:

We were able to learn something about stakeholders we’ve never know before

We were able to tell our story to donors or audiences and they shared it with others

A blogging program where there are more clients or stakeholders talking back in comments than posts

An online community where clients served are self-supporting each other and costs are reduced

We learn a lot from this experimental program, and pave the way for future projects, that could still be a success metric

We gain experience with a new way of two-way communication

We connect with a handful of advocates or donors like never before as they talk back and we listen

This is the way I'm viewed my current and past forays into social fundraising - yet the dollars raised is THE success metric, but there are also some important learnings:

• What is the flow of a networked fundraising drive? 
• What is the degree of influence or motivation of donors once you start getting past one degree of separation between donor and cause?
• Is there any best practice that works best for connecting with "wired activists"?
• When does donor fatigue happen in socially networked fundraising campaign?  Does it happen faster or slower?
• How does the ladder of engagement work (or not) as a networked fundraising campaign unfolds?
• What are some of the best ways to convince the .org's stakeholder group that may not be familiar with social media/networking that the learning is as valuable as the dollars raised?
• What triggers the networked effect and inspires others to carry your message to their networks?
• What's more important to the success of the campaign - an highly networked person who isn't as engaged in your cause to message out to their network or a highly passionate person about your cause with a smaller network?  Which one will encourage more spreading?
• How does strategy differ between a sprint type campaign versus a marathon?  Are marathons not best the fit for socially networked fundraising?  How long does it take to build and leverage momentum?

Still time to donate!

Social Media: Distributed Influence Quantifying the Impact of Social Media - A New White Paper from Edelman

 

Screencapture from Jonny Bentwood's White Paper on measuring influence.

Dave Webb answered my musings about quantifying the intangible with a pointer to this report and observation.  Dave Webb said "I have always had a problem forcing something that is organic by nature into a mechanical straightjacket. I mean, they're not called "intangibles" for nuthin'!"  Nonetheless, he recognizes, like me, the importance of looking at intangibles in a disciplined way.   For me, the issue is not so much quantifying the intangible, but making that quantification a standard.

On Twitter, Kami Huyse pointed over to her reflections on this paper which lead me again to the paper itself. 

A new whitepaper by Jonny Bentwood, a PR consultant for Edelman, Distributed Influence: Quantifying the Impact of Social Media (pdf) starts the conversation and attempt to address a method to quantify influence. The white paper is based on a roundtable held last year with a number of social media experts.

There's a lot to digest here. And before even getting to the meat of the metrics, conceptual models, and ideas, the introduction provides a powerful case for using social media that is well articulated:

For the first time in history, technology has reached a point where everyone has a voice. This voice, articulated through social media, can be extremely powerful and can force individuals, companies and communities to change the way they behave.

In Edelman’s 2007 Trust Barometer, results showed that employees or ‘someone like me’ are trusted far more than any other group of people. Combining this with the advent of socialmedia tools such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter has made an individual’s voice louder than ever before. Consequently, the need to understand which individuals are the most trusted or have the loudest voice has become increasingly important. However, at present there is no agreed reliable process for identifying who these people are or for quantifying the online value of one person over another.

The paper goes on to explain that measuring influence on blogs by number of subscribers and how many people linked to it isn't longer a credible metric because people are using a variety of different social media tools to connect with their audiences.   The paper describes a "Social Media Index" that looks at other criteria beyond this including presence and participation and friends on other social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, etc as well as page rank.   The intent was a scoreboard, but a catalyst for discussion that might lead to defining exactly what influence is.

The white includes a summary of discussion from a roundtable of social media experts discussing the attributes and dimensions of influence and how it differs from other attributes, for example attention.   It also raises the question, "Is influence what should be measured?"    A pithy quote from Jeff Jarvis in the side bar answers, "Starters and spreaders of memes are the most influential people."  It also identifies some other types of meme behavior including meme adapter, meme contributor, and meme reader.   Maybe the phrase "meme lurker" is better?.  This is beginning resonates with online community roles in a way.

The most interesting part was the discussion about the ladder of engagement that is used by activists and how social media flips it.  The conclusion here:

The ideal scenario was to use this concept to determine the precise time and place when both the influencers and the influenced would like to be engaged. What the roundtable concluded was that a system equivalent to Myers Briggs was needed for micro-communications. This would enable people to
be able to map target media, meme creation, consumption and sharing habits.

A suggested starting point would be to further analyze Forester's Social Technographics - or what people do online.  (Colleague David Wilcox has written about the report here). 

The last bit of the report describes how online communication and collaboration has changed and presents the four distinct quadrants for communication and collaboration:

1) Controlled Communication: One-way tactics such as TV advertising, online advertising and
media relations that are great for branding and visibility, but are seldom collaborative

2) Open Communication
Online initiatives, such as viral videos, that are designed to generate discussion, but not necessarily produce a shared outcome

3) Controlled Collaboration
Programmes that facilitate participation but are more controlled, for example numerous efforts to solicit consumer generated ads

4) Conversational Collaboration
Win-win initiatives that open a dialogue toward reaching a broader goal

The report ends with some good discussion questions and a lot of it is still far away from using the real world.  The big question - as applied to nonprofits.

How does one use this information – such as the index, the identification of meme spreaders, adapters, commentators - to shape a communication strategy?

How does one use the information to shape an evaluation of your communication strategy?

How does one use the information for continuous learning about how to use social media as a strategy for reaching your organization's outcomes?

ROI: Can You Quantify the Untangible? You Can't Quantify Love (or can you?)

Photo by Mayr

I'm working up a presentation and workshop on ROI and NpTech for Legal Services Corporation TIG Conference in a couple of weeks.  So, the most simplistic definition of  Return on Investment (ROI) is the difference between cost and income (or quantified benefits) and expressed in dollar amounts or percentages.

POP QUIZ:  True or False
The ROI Methodology collects just one data item, a financial ratio, expressed as a percentage.

It would be unfair and misguided to evaluate the success or failure of a technology project based on this one financial measure.   As Alison Fine suggested in an email to me, it leads people to thinking that there is one way to measure and one measurement.  ROI should collect measures related to efficiency, effectiveness, mission impact, ROI calculation above, and intangible benefits.   

Ah, those intangible benefits that many of us identify related to some technologies, say Social Networking sites, that are difficult, if not impossible to quantify, and often lead us to wonder whether it is all waste of time because there is now ROI.

 

"Anything can be measured in a way that is superior to not measuring it at all"   - Gilbs Law

That lead me to Tom Gilb, an engineer and measurement guru.   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?

This got me thinking, can you quantify love?

In Glib's Scales of Measures: How To Quantify, he suggests:

You should learn the art of developing your own tailored scales of measure for the performance and resource attributes, which are important to your organization or system. You cannot rely on being ‘given the answer’ about how to quantify. You would soon lose control over your current vital concerns if you waited for that!.

His point that some intangible may be quantified, but it takes some discussion around the attributes.  He gives an example of quantifying love (tongue and check)

So, if one look at the technology investments, identified the benefits, and through discussion identified the attributes, this might lead to some quantification of the value.  Would love some examples or perhaps this is the exercise I give to participants.

• 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 IT 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.

Does anyone have an example, using a technology investment, that quantifies the intangible in a credible way?  Do you agree that ROI isn't just about the numbers?