Live from OMMA Social: Panel on Measuring Social Media Panel

On the panel: David Berkowitz (moderator; Sr. Director of Emerging Media and Innovation, 360i)), Carla Bourque (VP Sales and Business Development, Six Apart), Steve Kerho (SVP, Analytics, Media and Marketing Optimization, Organic, inc.), Amber Naslund (Director of Community, Radians), Bill Stephenson (VP, Social Media Sales and Client Service, Nielsen Online), Jim Sterne (President, Target Marketing of Santa Barbara
 
How are you going to define success? Brand awareness, loyalty, sales, managing a crisis... The goal is different for each customer and each context. In addition, if you're looking for quantitative results, you have to have a quantitative benchmark.
 
What are marketers doing who are hitting it out of the park with social media? What are they doing right? One took the concept and divided it into two groups: response and engagement. Engagement was all about sentiment analysis, and there's a group of people who are called the listening center, and they follow the subject matter closely. The other group is taking social media as just yet another platform, measuring reach, response rates, etc, and back to the website, and then marrying the two together. They've recognized they need to listen and participate and monitor it as a direct response mechanism.
 
Marketing and advertising is throwing chum in the water, and if the fish start to bite that's when we can engage with them.
 
What could marketers be doing better? Understanding their audience. Behaviorally, what drives them to consume certain types of content, those marketers continue to want to get much more granular. What is this going to do to my fan base? Marketers are looking for the same kind of predictability that we've been able to deliver in other channels. Clients want to know which is the best channel, and that's why attribution modeling is so important.
 
Toyota did an amazing thing when they had a product recall -- instead of announcing it first through the media, they went to their most vocal, passionate fans and let them know. One of the most important features of social currency is new news -- letting someone be the first to have news is a great gift in this environment.
 
There’s a shift from sentiment to advocacy. When people are talking about your brand, does it drive signups, customers, loyalty, conversions? Does it have a positive or negative effect?
 
When is predictive analysis going to become part of social media measurement? Everyone is moving towards it, testing, measuring, and feeding that data back into their predictive models.