Measuring and Delivering Engagement with Social Media
At KickApps, we believe that social media (social networking, user-generated content and Widget for syndicating content) and programmable video are the cornerstone of growing and increasing audience engagement. Back in August, Forrester published some new research on engagement (you can download the report here). This is really important from the point of view that the industry is starting to define how social media is measured. The business reasons for this are obvious.
Here’s how Forrester breaks down the four components of engagement:
“Involvement—Includes web analytics like site traffic, page views, time spent, etc. This essentially is the component that measures if a person is present.
Interaction—This component addresses the more robust actions people take, such as buying a product, requesting a catalog, signing up for an email, posting a comment on a blog, uploading a photo or video, etc. These metrics come from e-commerce or social media platforms.
Intimacy—The sentiment or affinity that a person exhibits in the things they say or the actions they take, such as the meaning behind a blog post or comment, a product review, etc. Services such as brand monitoring help track these types of conversations.
Influence—Addresses the likelihood that a person will recommend your product or service to someone else. It can manifest itself through brand loyalty or through recommendations to friends, family, or acquaintances. These metrics mostly come from surveys (both qualitative and quantitative).”
I really like the way Forrester created these buckets and I think it has interesting implications for those looking at creating business cases for social media. As Brian Haven noted in his blog, my immediate take away is that there’s no straight forward approach. If anything, it calls for a tight integration between your social media initiatives and your overall marketing and product development efforts (in most cases there isn’t a more effective and efficient feedback loop than an online community).
We talk about the importance of this with our affiliate partners as they plan out their social media projects. Many of our affiliate implementations include technical discussions about the platform and also the non-technical success factors, i.e. community programming, marketing, community leadership, business model, etc. Involving business and marketing teams early to plan how they’re going to seed and promote their communities is critical to the success of an online community.
We’re also starting to see the formation of specialist consultants that have developed deep expertise in social media creation, viral community marketing and promotion. Jim Kerr, VP of New Media at the Pollack Media Group, puts it perfectly in an interview with FMQB, a radio industry trade this week. He talks about how he works with radio stations to think implement their social media initiatives:
“Much of what I’m doing now is taking radio stations and helping them integrate their current site to the KickApps platform. While KickApps is flexible enough to be quickly launched as a plug-and-play solution, we work closely with stations to make sure that there is a strategic framework to build around. You don’t just build a social network because it’s the hip thing to do.
So we look at a station’s website, its listener database, its airstaff, its current online revenue strategy, and how they all currently work together. We then work together with the station to give its large broadcast community a home on the Internet. Again, this is not just “build it and they will come.” I work to make sure that the execution at the station level includes plenty of interaction and content originating with the jocks, the on-air content of the station, and the needs of the sales staff.
Beyond individual station integration, we work with corporate and market managers at creating the ability for a specific radio station social network to eventually flow into a market-wide or national network. Luckily, this ability is built into the KickApps platform, so you can build a comprehensive individual station solution with the knowledge that a wider national or market-wide implementation can easily be grown from it.”
For those customers of ours who are executing well in this area it’s translating into real impact on their business through increased audience size, time spent on the site, and increased advertising revenues.
