One of the most common questions I’m getting these days is “how should I measure the value of all the social marketing things we’re doing like Twitter, Linked-in, Facebook, etc.?”

My answer: WHY are you doing them in the first place? If you can’t answer that, you’re wasting your time and the company’s money.

Sounds simple I know, but I’m stunned at how unclear many marketers are about their intentions/expectations/hypotheses for how social media initiatives might actually help their business. In short, if you can’t describe in two sentences or less (no semi-colons) WHAT you hope to gain through use of social media, then WHY are you doing it? Measurement isn’t the problem. If you don’t know where you’re going, any measurement approach will work.

Here’s a framework for thinking about social measurement:

1. Fill in the blanks: “Adding or swapping-in social media initiatives will impact ____________ by __________ extent over _____________ timeframe. And when that happens, the added value for the business will be $_____________, which will give me an ROI of ______________. ” This forms your hypotheses about what you might achieve, and why the rest of the business should care.
2. Identify all the assumptions implicit in your hypotheses and “flex” each assumption up/down by 50% to 100% to see under which circumstances your assumptions become unprofitable.
3. Identify the most sensitive assumption variables — those that tend to dramatically change the hypothesized payback by the greatest degree based on small changes in the assumption. These are your key uncertainties.
4. Enhance your understanding of the sensitive assumptions through small-scale experiments constructed across broad ranges of the sensitive variables. Plan your experiments in ways you can safely FAIL, but mostly in ways to help you understand clearly what it would take to SUCCEED — even if that turns out to be unprofitable upon further analysis. That way, you will at least know what won’t work, and change your hypotheses in #1 above accordingly.
5. Repeat steps 1 thru 4 until you have a model that seems to work.
6. In the process, the drivers of program success will become very obvious. Those become your key metrics to monitor.

In short, measuring the payback on social media requires a sound initial business case that lays out all the assumptions and uncertainties, then methodically iterates through tests to find the model(s) that work best. Plan to fail in small scale, but most important, plan to LEARN quickly.

Measure social media as you should any other marketing investment: How did it perform versus your expectations of how it should have? If those expectations are rooted in principles of profit-generation, your measurement will be relevant and insightful.

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Pat LaPointe is Managing Partner at MarketingNPV — specialty consultants on marketing measurement and metrics, and publishers of MarketingNPV Journal, available online free at http://www.MarketingNPV.com

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Twittering Away Time And Money

Google is reportedly launching a new lab in Google Labs called Flipper, which takes Google News to a much more visual place, by showing news stories as thumbnails of the actual pages they reside on.

TechCrunch managed to get a screenshot of the service, which is apparently only available on a password-protected server at this point, but said to be launching soon, although we haven’t heard or seen any official comments from Google.

Google Flipper (Via TC)

Based on the screenshot, you can see that you can browse by section (politics, business, US, World, Sports, Sci/Tech, Entertainment, Health, Opinion, Travel) as seen on the left-hand side. At the top are tabs for "recent," "most viewed," "recommended," and "headlines." At the bottom are tabs for different sources, which should make for an interesting way to read stories from specific sources you like.

It’s a little hard to say much about the service before it has launched and anybody has had a chance to use it, but it looks like it has quite a bit of potential. It’s hard to tell how the "big publishers" will react to this, but I doubt any widespread controversy will come of it either way as long as it is only a lab. However, when labs are perfected, they do have the potential to become full-fledged features.

On the other hand, it is possible that publishers are partially behind the lab. "I’m going to guess that Flipper may be something that Google developed in conjunction with publishers, who have lobbied for more visible placement in Google News and contended their brands have been diluted and their content ‘devalued’ by intermingling on Google News with random blogs and no-name sources," speculates Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land. "The assumption might be that seeing the branded pages will yield better response for these publishers, who assume their publications are more trusted by consumers, and so on."

Speaking of getting more visual placement in Google News, the company has recently posted a FAQ page for Google News publishers, which does touch on image inclusion. If publishers have images and they’re not showing up in Google News, the company lists some possible reasons:

- Your images are hosted on a different domain from your main site (for example, your articles are at mynews.com and your images are at myimages.com)

- Your images are too small, or the aspect ratios are different than what we look for

- Your images aren’t inline (i.e., they’re clickable)

- Your images may be too low-resolution

- Your images may be positioned too far from your article titles

-  Your images may lack captions

Those are guidelines for all publishers though. This does not exactly solve the problem for "big publishers" Sterling mentions. If Flipper is only for big publishers, it could certainly go a long way to highlighting the big brands in Google News, should it ever become an actual feature and not just a lab. However, that would start a whole new argument (or the same old one, depending on how you look at it) from the smaller guys.

At the MediaPost Search Insider Summit, I got the opportunity to join a panel on social media and search with Darrin Shamo of Zappos and panel moderator Bob Heyman of MediaSmith (and co-author of the book Digital Engagement). I’m not going to discuss that panel here and will leave that to another post. But an interesting thing came up during my presentation…

The event is pretty heavily weighted toward SEM and I asked what turned out, to those in attendance, to be a bit of a dopey question. I asked "How many here are interested purely in SEM?" then when only a couple of hands were raised, I was encouraged to think it may be more of an SEO crowd, so I asked "How many are interested purely in SEO?" and saw only another sprinkling of raised hands.

So, based on one of my previous experiences at a major company where the team was half SEM and half SEO, and my current position, which is entirely SEO team with no SEM – I assumed a similar situation would be true of most in-house teams at substantially sized companies.

My assumption was apparently skewed. It seems that most do double-duty on in-house teams. When I asked "What’s the balance here?" a few people said, (a few with emotion) "Both!"

That surprised me, based on what I knew before asking that question. But now I know that, at least among the crowd attending Search Insider Summit, that the oft joined SEM/SEO label applies to most. Well I suppose that was a gaff then, but…

Later in the day, I overheard a conversation on a shuttle bus which makes me wonder if SEO is being best served by in-house SEM/SEO’s. After two strangers from the conference exchanged greetings & pleasantries, the inevitable "What do you do?" came up from one.

The answer, "SEM and I’ve been tasked with learning SEO for our team." (emphasis mine) Then the response from an ill-informed questioner was short-sighted and probably simplistic thinking from those who THINK they understand SEO – "So you’re learning about meta tags and H1’s?"

I’d like to argue that the two disciplines should be divided and I’d wager that many SEM’s who love what they do will agree. The skill-set is completely different. Both SEM’s and SEO’s deal with keywords, and target search engine results pages, but that is where the similarity ends.

Having recently worked day-to-day with an SEM team in-house and being separated only by a cubicle wall for 18 months. I recall the SEO team only dealing with the SEM team during our bi-weekly online marketing group meetings.

So if someone who loves SEM is "tasked with learning SEO," (like that overheard conversation I mentioned above) they are not likely to understand or fully invest themselves in truly learning an important aspect of the Search Marketing business. They’ll learn a couple of things and not all aspects of the work. They’ll continue to do a great job of SEM and start doing a poor job of SEO.

I’ll also argue that if that role is reversed and an SEO is "tasked with learning SEM for the team" then they will learn a few things, but not all of the elements of good SEM and not do a complete and thorough job of SEM but will continue to do a good job of SEO.

I recall a couple of job interviews about 5 years ago where in both cases, I was talking with an SEM manager who had convinced their boss that they needed a full-time SEO on staff to handle things they weren’t able to continue doing as the company grew. Rather than evenly split SEM and SEO tasks among two staffers, they were dividing the two. That’s the smart way to go.

I didn’t take either of those jobs, and I’m quite happy about that now. I also walked away from a job that would have required me to significantly sharpen my SEM skills so that I could handle both. I didn’t doubt that I could do it, but love SEO and very likely wouldn’t have done as well with the SEM piece.

So I’d like to ask the question of those SEM/SEO dual purpose people – are you doing both because you love both or are you doing both because you were "tasked to learn" one of those pieces because your company won’t increase the budget enough for a new head on the payroll? Would you rather focus on one or continue doing both?

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