Image courtesy of Anssi Koskinen, Flickr Creative Commons

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of social media ROI, and how to measure it. However, the more I think about it, the more it comes down to this: can we measure effective engagement with stakeholders, and how we move them to action?

Within social media, the ROI is actually Return on Engagement (ROE).

All other activities are those leading to ROE.

The ROI discussion needs to focus on defining meaningful engagement, how that happens, and comparing the return on engagement from campaign to campaign or from ask to ask. Amy Sample Ward writes, “is ROI limiting our community impact?” I think it is. Understanding and defining ROE is a much better measurement of the health of your online community and the long-term the success of your online strategy.

Recently, I participated in the To Mama With Love Mother’s Day fundraising campaign for Epic Change. This campaign raised over $30,000 in just five days. almost doubling last year’s success. Stacey Monk, Epic Change’s founder, asked why this year’s campaign was so much more successful than last year’s. ROE provides an easy answer: there was a much larger core group of highly engaged stakeholders who felt ownership planning and executing the campaign.

The planning group was inclusionary, transparent, stakeholder-owned, and accessible. Stacey formed a private planning group and invited anyone willing to commit to helping To Mama With Love raise funds and awareness, and she asked those people to extend the invitation to their friends. I was a member of the group and we were given a lot of opportunities to own the campaign. Ultimately, this was the group that acted: we blogged about it, personally asked friends to give, tweeted it, and propelled it forward. I suspect that Stacey Monk invested a lot of her time over the past year creating a “tribe” of Epic Change stakeholders, which paid off during this campaign. In this case, you can measure the outcome: $30,627.

Brandon Murphy, of 22Squared, a digital agency, created an incredibly interesting case study documenting the real value of social media, which is…Return on Engagement. 22Squared contends that really social digital media should focuses on objectives such as advocacy, trust, loyalty, and influence instead of reach, awareness, and simple engagement.

22Squared analyzed the social media activities of 100 popular corporate brand, and those effects on consumers. They defined four types of online consumer activities: engage, contribute, participate, and create. Comparing the impact of the actions of consumers from each of the four action categories with each other, they found: Those who participated and created generated 2.5 times more conversations than the lower-involvement “engage” group. They also influenced four times as many purchases as those brands using social media without higher-involvement participatory engagement.

Thinking back to To Mama With Love: the planning group involved all four types of action: we engaged, contributed, participated, and created. We blogged about it, tweeted it, and created heartspaces. Also, any website visitor who wanted to make a donation to To Mama With Love had to, at the very minimum, engage by making a donation, and then create by making a heartspace. TMWL set itself up to create real return on engagement. Those who participated most likely tweeted and posted updates to their social spaces about the event, too.

Thinking about Return on Engagement, instead of Return on Investment, changes the approach to social media. Instead of focusing on followers, think about how to create an engaged group of stakeholders, and what online activities will create that engagement. When designing your next social media strategy or campaign, integrate and encourage high ROE activities to yield more successful outcomes.

I’m presenting a free online webinar entitled, “What’s the ROI? Measuring the ROI of Social Media” on May 18 at 3pm EST. These are some of the things I’ll be talking about, along with another case study and information about what to measure. In the meanwhile, I’ll continue to think about ROE, and look forward to your thoughts on it as well.

Resources:

Amy Sample Ward’s social media metrics template is a great engagement metrics tracking starting point, and her blog post on DIY Community Engagement Metrics.

image courtesy of tony newell

I’ve been exploring paid social media monitoring systems as part of my role at FirstGiving. Initially, I was pretty excited about being able to monitor social media sentiment. Measuring aggregate sentiment over time seemed obvious to me. However, it became clear that none of the tools monitored sentiment well. In fact, they were all terrible at returning real online user sentiment. Neutral tweets were marked as negative or positive, positive tweets were marked as negative, and so forth. After researching sentiment analysis, I was not surprised to read that automated sentiment analysis is slightly less accurate than flipping a coin to determine whether or not brand mentions are positive or negative. (I tried to tweak the returns by manually changing the sentiments to influence the automatic marking, but that had no effect on accuracy.)   I had been thinking that measuring sentiment analysis was the key to getting real ROI. I was completely wrong.

Measuring social media sentiment is the measuring the wrong ROI.

Sentiment analysis and measurement at companies is often driven by the need to prove the ROI (return on investment) of social media. Pressured to prove the value of social media involvement, the person in charge of social media will be tempted to prove his/her value by highlighting the percent change in positive online mentions. I would argue that measuring the change in sentiment is the wrong ROI to measure.

The right ROI measurement should be increased engagement and interactions.

Positive brand sentiment is nice. Does it move people to action? US internet users are likely to share information about your company and proactively recommend that someone make a purchase online, so engaging with stakeholders online supports that behavior. You really want to engage in such a way as to add value and create brand loyalty. Taking action as a result of social media is the ultimate ROI.

With the right engagement activity, loyal clients and consumers should naturally take the actions that you want them to take. Begin by measuring the level of online engagement with your organization, and make your plan based on that information. If your activists/clients/consumers are not talking to you at all online, that’s the engagement equivalent of negative sentiment. If they mention you in passing, that’s the engagement equivalent of neutral sentiment.

Let’s turn the ideal ROI of increased positive online sentiment on its head, and replace it with measuring increased positive online engagement with the organization. I wrote a similar statement in the comments of Shel Israel’s wonderful blog post describing his mixed emotions about sentiment analysis. Tal Wolgroch replied in the comments that “sentiment analysis is not about traditional ROI anymore. Those who try to measure it this way are playing a new game with an old rulebook.”

Stop trying to measure sentiment. Worry about your lack of engagement.

Image courtesy of Jeremy Levine Design

A recent Reuter’s article: Top Ten Trends in Sustainable Business, focuses on the best trends in “green business,” I’m struck by how many of the points are applicable to sustainable social media. Here are my top trends in sustainable social media (hat tip to Reuters):

1. A deeper understanding of what sustainable social media means

Sustainable social media is not about creating a Facebook page so people can find you, or tweeting your blog posts automatically, it’s about long term engagement. Sustainable social media means creating conversations, really listening to your stakeholders’ needs, bringing stakeholders into your company for their input, and creating long-term strategies for deeper two-way engagement. If you have a deeper understanding of what sustainable social media means, you’ll see the return in customer loyalty, volunteerism, deeper engagement, and a host of other actions.

2. Your employees are your secret weapon

True – they know and love your organization. Let your employees tweet, use Facebook, answer questions on Yahoo! Answers, post questions on Linkedin Groups, and more…on the organization’s behalf. They are the customer and client touch points. More and more companies are creating social media policies. You could create a social media policy for the workplace, ideally clear and simple, and as open as possible. Here are a number of collected social media policies.

3. Speaking with rather than to your customers

The beauty of social media is that it allows real conversation. That’s called Web 2.0. Your stakeholders are using social media because they are asking to be part of the conversation. Bring ‘em in! Dr. Phil asks his Facebook fans questions. Donor Tools asked its customers where they should volunteer via their blog. Where can you get the great ideas your stakeholders have to share?

4. Storytelling and social media dance the perfect tango

You have a back story. Your products, your services, and your organization have a back story too. People don’t want statistics and data, they want people, stories, and personal connections to the company. Use social media to give it to them. Here is a moving video about Abe’s Market that isn’t about Abe’s Market at all – but the producers who sell their organic goods to Abe’s. And I dare you not to cry at this moving video story from the organization Darius Goes West.  What’s your story? How can you use social media to convey the story? How can you gather even more stories from the people who are engaged with your organization? Stories sustain interest, and your social media efforts.

5. Transparency is the badge of social media trust

Social media begs transparency. Don’t hide anything because there are hundreds of people who would love to know the dirt and don’t mind digging for it. If you know your organization is hiding something, or not being as forthright as it should, it will come out… Eventually… somewhere on social media. And then it will be a big mess. Just look at Habitat UK. And here’s another true story: I know of a company that set up five twitter accounts so that the related accounts would retweet the company’s account. The same company also created a fake Facebook account to “friend” people and eventually encourage them to become a fan of the company’s Facebook Page. Fraudulent? Yep. Uncool? Totally. I’m waiting for someone to “out” them.

The more transparent your organization is, the more trustworthy your social media will be. And sustainable social media is all about building and maintaining trust.

6. There really is such a thing as ROI

People will argue that you can’t determine return on investment from social media. Or return on influence. Or return on insight. I disagree. You can clearly see the effects that social media has on sales, membership, website visits, conversion rates from social media channels, online campaigns, and more. To create ROI, it’s critical to determine ahead of time what your organization’s goals are for social media. If it’s more online mentions, measure that. If it’s donations, or memberships, then track the activity through social media channels. Sustainable social media means measuring the return.

7. Create a strategy. Then follow it, and adjust it.

Your approach to social media should be strategic. Without an overall strategy, you’re just throwing pasta at the wall and hoping some of it will stick. The trend is away from individual channel approaches, towards a comprehensive strategy (as it should be). To do that, review your organizational and program goals, internal capacity, time, and level of commitment to social media. Create a social media strategy that supports your goals, and gets your organization where it wants to be. Define the channels you want to use, how you will use them, and how using each channel will help your organization meet its defined goals. Implement your strategy and adjust as needed. Sustainable social media means having a recipe and following it so that you are using social media effectively to support the company’s goals. And adjusting as needed (see #9).

8. Website integration

Social media shouldn’t stand on its own. Sustainable social media strategy means that your entire web presence (including social media profiles and activities) ARE your website. It’s not just your URL now. I’m pleased to see more integration between websites and social in the last year. Examples are Facebook’s new “Like button” that you can put on your website, the social sharing features (tweetmeme, addthis, etc), integration of YouTube within websites and the blog on the home page. Until recently, the blog was always relegated to its own page, or a separate site. To create sustainable social media, you have to integrate the social into the website, while the website should also send readers out to your social spaces. It’s all one site.

9. Fear of Failure: to succeed, you can’t be afraid to fail.

Platforms change all the time, the audience becomes more savvy and jaded, and it’s a brave new world every day in social media. One day you think you understand a platform such as Facebook, and the next day Facebook changes the world. However, I’m starting to sense a fear of failure that may fossilize into a mindset as social media becomes more common. I hope not.

Trying is succeeding. Trying something new, solidly based upon strategic planning, is sustainable social media. Failure teaches important lessons to you, and to us all. It’s a big social media lab right now, and we’re always on the lookout for new combination that work. Don’t be afraid to try.

10. Stakeholders are upset if you’re NOT listening.

If you aren’t at least listening for mentions of your organization, key products/services/brands, then you’re missing out on the conversation. Customers are most often going to use twitter to complain and praise…and ask for attention. Set up web alerts of all types. It’s best to listen and respond. The expectation now is that you are listening. If you are not responding, little problems quickly become big ones. Listen and respond.

I think these are the big ones. What other trends are you seeing in Sustainable Social Media?