Paul's Web Space 2.1

Social Media Measurement

Social media applications are developing at such a rapid clip that measurement technologies haven't really kept pace. I have the daunting task of determining what success means for the social media efforts underway at edweek.org, and then even more challenging, how to measure it. In my mind, success in our community efforts can be envisioned following a continuum of goals:

1. Traffic. Since we're an advertising-supported media site, for various reasons, a simple increase in traffic represents perhaps the most basic target. More traffic means more ad inventory to sell, and increases our standing with both advertisers and funders. We hope that simply adding social media features such as comments and forums to our site would boost traffic, but the challenge will be to determine how to measure these results.
   
   I intend to analyze our overall traffic to see if there is any increase in growth coincident with the introduction of comments, forums, blogs, etc. to our site. Since we've been introducing these changes over time, however, we'll also need to figure out a way to distinguish traffic trends on parts of our site that include opportunities for community participation from trends in areas little touched by these efforts. We could also hypothesize about how usage patterns might be altered by increasing use of social media, such as perhaps time spent on site, or differences in usage patterns exhibited by readers who have created social network profiles, or who have commented on the site, compared with less active users or simply average traffic patterns.
   
   
2. Engagement. The theory is that community media features and opportunities create more engaged readers, so measuring page views, time spent, and return visits per visitor among community participants would presumably indicate increased engagement with our site. We could also analyze the volume of participation — number of comments/forum posts, etc., both aggregate and per community member, and maybe even undertake to review a selection of the posts, trying to ascertain quality and appropriateness, even attempting to track trends in this area over time.
   
   
3. Impact. This gets even trickier. Our qualitative analysis of community contributions could perhaps demonstrate the effect that our journalism – and the conversations surrounding it – is having on people who care about education policy. We will also attempt to build in feedback systems, so that interesting or provocative comments – or suggestions, leads, and potential sources – would be passed back to reporters and editors. From there, we could try to track the number of times a comment led to a correction or a story idea, and thus actually informed our journalism.
   
   We could also search through forums for people posting follow-up comments indicating that a particular bit of advice helped in the classroom or informed the policy process. This is trickiest, and perhaps least quantitative, but useful both to help us justify this work and demonstrate its impact on the educational enterprise. We intend to identify active participants from the community as well as staff to help us track and utilize quality contributions made by readers.

These ideas cover only the measurement of social media content contributed to our site by our readers. Left untouched (so far) is the impact that will be felt as we engage in the larger conversation on the World Wild Web, via RSS feeds, social networks, widgets, social bookmarks, tagging and the like. Look in a future post for my treatment of the measurement of and ROI related to these efforts, the effects of which are even less well understood at this point.

I realize that this is already way too long, but I also want to pass along quality reference and background material from some of my favorite thinkers in this space.

Beth Kanter has created numerous resource devoted to examining the subject. She hosts a wiki entitled "Social Media Metrics, Measurement, and ROI: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach" which contains numerous links to quality resources, and her presentation at Podcamp Boston:


Beth's Blog also covers this topic extensively:
Why Your Social Media or Social Fundraising Plan Should Include Success Metrics

Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research frequently blogs about social media:
Why Your Social Media Plan should have Success Metrics

Finally, Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs gave a great presentation at the WidgetDevCamp he helped organize and I attended a couple weeks ago, making a strong case for the growing importance of social media and of devising a strategy for utilizing it:

Labels: measurement, metrics, socialmedia, strategy

   Link: http://socialmediametrics.wikispaces.com/

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