Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Social Media Measuring Maturing?

In reading today's article in eMarketer: When will Social Media Measurement Mature? I have to confess I had a little bit of a visceral reaction: What do you mean mature? here is a non comprehensive list of the things we can give Marketers today, for some of these I have been involved personally in making them possible:
  • We can monitor public venues of online conversation for specific keywords or key phrases, if the venue allows to identify the author we can see who started and who joined the conversation and we can even see how it grew and spread across other networks. 
  • We can allow you to track who shared (depending on implementation this may render actual emails, names or maybe it only delivers knowledge at the level of anonymous cookies, that can certainly be used for personalization and targeting) 
  • We can track who reacted to the shares mentioned above, and how many of those actually render leads and conversions (in whatever way you decide to define a lead or conversion) 
  • We can see inbound visits from all of the above to your Ecommerce pages 

With all of these we can give you: 
  • A clear understanding of who talks about you, what are they saying and where. A clear understanding of who reacts to that and how.
  • A clear understanding of what of the content, messages, offers that you put out there are actually considered worth of sharing, by whom and how many others reacted to the initial share and how many leads and conversions that brought back to you 
  • we can help you identify who is an authority in the space you care about, who shares and gets others to visit, who advocates for you and gets others to try your products, who is displeased and how many others are they affecting. 
  • We can tell you a lot about all of the above individuals: what is their location? gender? income level? and many other demographic aspects of their persona. 
  • We can make all of this available real time so you can adjust your relationship and message any time, anywhere (in your site, in third party sites) 
I am by no means saying the platforms we offer are perfect, far from it... and we are yet to deliver on a much more integrated set of capabilities. furthermore I think a lot of the confusion stems of the fact that we, as an industry, refuse to agree on a standard set of semantics and formal definitions around them which will help practitioners learn, benchmark and teach others and share that experience in a standard and understandable way. 

However you can't tell me metrics are not available today, they are not easy and do need to mature and integrate... but they are available, lets use them 

What do you think? 

Filiberto Selvas 

1 comment:

Daniel Milstein said...

That is so true. As an author and business man, I can relate to how you said "We can track who reacted to the shares mentioned above, and how many of those actually render leads and conversions".I hope more people discover your blog because you really know what you're talking about. Can't wait to read more from you!