(Social Media) Measurementcamp
Creating a universal set of metrics that can be used to gauge the success and returns achieved by using social media has long been a hot topic of debate, so to join in the debate we decided to visit Measurementcamp yesterday.
The event took place at Dare and was fronted by a very affable chap by the name of Will McInnes. The purpose of the collaborative initiative is to create open resources, be they guidelines, frameworks, metrics etc, which allow us all to measure the impact of social media online and offline. As Will put it, the initiative is un-owned and relies on feedback, hence this post.
The 2 hour event kicked off with some introductions among the nearest group of people - within which we had Beth Granter who later gave a presentation on work she had been doing at her agency The Good Agency, Claire the PR lady who has been working with Metia, and one other lady whose name escapes me but who I recall came from a job/recruitment site.
Next up were two presentations, one from Beth (mentioned above), the other from Robin Wilson, one of Measurementcamp's co-founders.
Beth walked us through her work with an animal charity (sorry, didn't scribble down the name!) and how specifically she used social media to a) Drive traffic to their website, b) Increase awareness of the charity and its campaigns, and c) Increase charitable donations.
Much of Beth's efforts were concentrated on Flickr, Facebook and Twitter, with the likes of QDOS, Samepoint, FlickrStats and Google Analytics used to create reports and metrics that could be fed back to the client to validate the project.
The second presentation from Robin (of McCann) focused on his work with Durex, and in particular one of their newer female orgasm heightening products. The campaign was aimed at a) Increasing sales, b) De-stigmatising the category and c) Making Durex less clinical and more fun. The campaign was aptly titled 'Things that make you go oh'. Like it Robin!
Robin used three main constructs to report back to his client, namely Conversation Triggers, Conversations Created and People Engaged. Most interesting however was how he used 'reach' statistics to allow a direct comparison with his work and that taking place in other channels such as advertising and DM. The conclusion of this was that social media was twice as effective, though how much post-rationalisation that went on here is anyone's guess!
The big take-outs that I came away with from the session were:
- There are lots of ways of measuring social media, though practitioners don't trust them all yet
- Facebook still provides the most powerful vehicle to engage in conversation and build brand and campaign awareness
- There is a need to create bespoke social media dashboards since each social media platform has its own and it can take a lot of time gathering the data up and wrapping it for onward presentation to clients
- Their is often a delay from 'input' to 'response' that needs to be carefully considered when seeding content
- Tracking sentiment is, and is always likely to be, very difficult due to its subjectivity. Get over it and move on!
- This is an extremely young practice, and the many ways in which people are approaching it, from agencies to individuals, further supports this fact.
All in all it was a great event and I praise the co-founders' attempts to iron out some of the differences and negativity around social media. It is a powerful medium that should be considered as part of the mix, but objective planning is oh so important to truly understand whether or not social media can offer a solution. As both speakers bravely confirmed, their campaigns did not meet all their objectives, but certainly hit most of them. With shared learnings comes a stronger, more forthright approach. Onwards and upwards Measurementcamp!
Categories: Co-creation.
Tags: Co-creation, Measurementcamp, social media
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