Measuring Social Media - update Dr Tom Watson Bournemouth University Chair of Judges, AMEC Awards

Agenda Recent research - SNCR AMEC awards feedback IPRA discussion

Current situation Transition period Old print-based habits Change from messages to conversations; from known to unknown audiences

SNCR Report Social media: “… struggling to find effective metrics for deciding who are the influential players”

Cases World-famous Mayo Clinic has been encouraged by popularity of podcasts to expand its range of social media for health enquirers Union Gospel Mission assiduously tracks online comment about it and engages with a new audience, but is unsure whether this engagement has the credibility of traditional media M/A/R/C Research says its CEO’s informative and quirky blog as creating opportunities for him to meet new audiences through writing and speaking But case studies show that a single metric for influence is a forlorn hope, as it is with traditional media

Current practices - 1 Top criteria for determining the relevance or influence of a blogger or podcaster are quality of content, relevance of content to the company or brand, and search engine rank For evaluating a person’s influence in online communities and social networks, the main measures are participation level, frequency of activity and prominence in the market or community.

Current practice - 2 About half the surveyed communicators formally measure their social media activities Their goals are “to enhance relationships, improve the reputation of their businesses, drive customer awareness of their online activities and solicit customer comments and feedback.” (p.16)

Narrow evaluation (SNCR) Surprised that, in evaluating influence generated by social media campaigns, practitioners placed more weight on “standard Internet measures like search engine ranking and website traffic … as being more useful in determining their organization’s own influence than audience awareness or bottom-line results”. Popularity of the quantitative criteria was intriguing because the benefits of conversation/WOM have been touted to be brand awareness and customer satisfaction” (p.12). That is, volume was being measured at the expense of depth and interaction.

Routes forward The way ahead may be a more qualitatively-focused approach to measurement and evaluation of social media and influencers Before an AVE is invented for social media, can PR people move on measurement of the conversation rather than over-interpret the peripheral data?

AMEC awards feedback Standard higher than 2007 Written standards higher More entries on online PR and social media (but not a big leap) Too many claims of correlation, without evidence Not enough thought on content and authority

IPRA Congress discussion Don Stacks (UMiami): Easy to measure traffic but very complex to measure impact Solution may be social network analysis Based on sociological research; highly mathematical; Marcovian chain analysis Track bloggers, code content, who is talking to whom

IPRA Congress discussion Peter Verrengia, Fleishman-Hillard Social media difficult to measure but so important to the future of PR and communication Difficult to understand what’s happening; great volume of internet traffic to track Can’t go back 6 months; Volume of analysis rises with more languages Some automation but not for tone

Talking of volume China has 200 million ‘netizens’ in a population of 1.3 billion (and growing)

What does it all mean? Quantitative – traffic and unique clicks for volume; Conversation Index (author: comments and track backs) [Output] Significance – social media as a poll of focus group with assessment of messages and reputational elements [Out-take] Pullability – blog/wiki authority that passes progresses information [Out-pull?] Qualitative – content analysis of dialogue; network analysis

Reading Tom Watson & Paul Noble, 2007, Evaluating Public Relations (2 nd edition), London: Kogan Page single/final_report_new_media_new_i nfluencers_and_implications_for_the_ public_rela/

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