Yesterday saw the third Measurement Camp in Dublin, with attendees from a variety of backgrounds contributing to some great discussion on the central issue of how you measure social media.

Phil Macartney from Bebo presented the example of a Coca Cola campaign to demonstrate how they might measure a campaign on Bebo. You can see Phil’s presentation in full below :

Phil’s presentation focused on a paid-for campaign at Bebo, but he emphasised the need to stop thinking about campaign costs as a ‘cost per friend’. Looking at your campaign success in this way overlooks the true nature of social media. Your results of a campaign are not contained neatly in a number of friends that you’ve ‘pocketed’ but in the wider engagement around your brand. Phil highlighted that in this particular campaign, with the example that 629 people had chosen to download the branded skin. As Sean Fee pointed out, there is the other metric to consider of how many profile views each of those downloads received. This point in particular demonstrates the open and sometimes immeasurable aspects of social media.

Martha Rotter from Microsoft presented on the adoption of social media within a large organisation (presentation to follow)

For those of us from the agency side, Martha’s talk provided a valuable insight into how social media is viewed within a business and highlighted in particular the issue around internal adoption of social media tools. Martha also discussed how social media internally may not be measured in terms of traditional marketing dollars, but in the time that employees are spending on social media. This is an interesting point that many of us may not come across. As much as agencies try to prove to clients the value of social media, employees are having to prove to their colleagues the value in participating in the conversation.

There were some interesting discussion points during the workshops on fictional client briefs. In one example – a gym that’s producing a ‘weight loss widget’, the group focused on the end result as being increased subscriptions then worked backwards to work out how the design and promotion of the widget could fit around this. The distribution channels were also key here. The group highlighted the metrics of mentions online, but kept this as a tertiary, final stage of measurement. This approach is certainly more in sync with what the client is looking for, my only concern would be if sales drives the social media approach too heavily. This becomes too removed from the fact that the tools of social media allow us to create communities in ways never before possible and they may see through any overt sales tactic. There is definitely a happy medium here, where there is a need to focus on what the consumer actually wants and converse with them, while remembering that businesses ultimately have one end result of increased revenue.

The issue of too much measurement also came up. When discussing the metrics of measuring blog posts for examples, one attendee raised the point that the questions that are being asked of social media, would never be asked of advertorial. This is where we are all learning just how much we should measure. The danger and beauty of online is that it’s absolutely transparent and we are faced with an abundance of metrics. It can be tempting to ‘over-measure’ when what you could ultimately be doing is presenting an endless stream of numbers that are based in little real-world meaning to the client.

The next stage for Measurement Camp Dublin is to develop a collaborative wiki which we can all contribute to, to share resources as well as social media successes and failures. I’ll be working with Dena and Fred on building the wiki, but all contribution is welcome! It’s evident that we are still finding our way – the whole industry is – so what we need to do is help each other out to really move things forward. I’ll keep you posted on the wiki, watch this space

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