Social Media Success Measurement

Good stuff about social media measurement from Katie Paine.

Paine is CEO and founder of Katie Paine and Partners, a marketing and PR measurement consultancy, and the author of the book Measuring Public Relationships. In an interview with CW Magazine Executive Editor Natasha Nicholson for the CW Radio podcast, she talked about how social media have changed marketing and PR, and offered tips on how communicators can measure their social media efforts.

We have to redefine our measure of success. Because it used to be that big numbers were better. So a million “eyeballs” in The New York Times or a million “eyeballs” per month on nytimes.com doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is how many people actually do something. So it’s not how many eyeballs but what the people who own those eyeballs are actually doing with the stuff you are sending. Are they clicking? Are they engaging, responding or retweeting? Are they signing up? Are they giving you an e-mail address? Are they actually interacting with your brand? That’s what matters. And it’s going to be very small numbers.

I use the example that in the olden days, Walmart would have counted success by reaching 11 million people or 11 million moms. Now they credit 11 moms who got a whole bunch of people to get engaged with their product. They literally said, “one of the reasons we made our profit numbers in quarter one of this year [2009] was because of those 11 moms.” Eleven. Not 11 million, but just 11. That’s all it took, because those moms became engaged with the brand, passed on the information and literally contributed to sales.

Learn more at IABC: CW Bulletin Paine.