In Part 1 of this two-part series, we explored the limitations of channel measurement and how this often silo’d, measurement approach rarely reflects the customer reality:

“Many companies align their marketing departments according to channel teams . . . It’s easy to understand how this structure would make operational sense for a large organization. It makes for a very clear and concise organizational chart. Yet, customers are rarely funneled down these discreet and carefully delineated paths. The target’s path is often blurred and meandering, crossing several marketing channels before arriving at “customer-hood”. All acknowledge this reality, yet measurement structures rarely reflect it.“

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A “measurement bridge”, between channels, is needed to create an accurate view of comprehensive marketing performance.

Social Media can become the measurement bridge between individual marketing channels. When leveraged properly, data from Social Media acts as an adhesive, binding individual channel performance into an accurate, holistic view.

With data carefully gathered from metrics and conversations in the social web and inbound performance metrics, SOCIALtality calculates a series of Key Performance Indicators. These KPIs span the entire marketing channel mix and provide decision-makers with a comprehensive and detailed view of a company’s ability to attract, engage and retain customers. Collectively, we refer to these KPIs as Social Intelligence:

Social Intelligence is first calculated for each individual channel based on its inbound performance. Each individual channel’s Social Intelligence is then aggregated into a comprehensive brand Social Intelligence. In this part of the series, we’ll discuss selected KPIs in greater detail, explaining the valuable role they play in providing an accurate and holistic picture of marketing performance.

Engagement
A measure of your ability and willingness to engage with your audience. Ultimately, it is the measure of how much of a voice you have in the competitive marketplace, how much that voice resonates and how effectively that voice captures the interest of your community. Channel engagement is calculated from several data points, through multiple sources. An Engagement Score for the web channel is factored, in part from, an analysis of reviews, traffic sources, content consumption, etc.

Loyalty
Is calculated by measuring the average length and depth of an engaged customer relationship. Continuing with the web channel example, Loyalty is calculated, in part, by factoring depth of visit, length of visit, regency, repetition and average visitor volume for a period of time specified by the channel’s assigned priority.

Retention
As a holistic score, Retention denotes the frequency that you attract repeat engagements across multiple channels and how often a single customer is exposed to more than one channel. As a web channel measure, Retention is factored, in part, by bounce rate and visitor trending over a defined period of time. Much like Loyalty, the period of time is set by the channel’s pre-determined priority to the overall marketing effort.

Sentiment
A hot button topic for many trying to measure Social Media, SOCIALtality creates a multi-dimension Sentiment assessment. For both multi and single channel analysis, Sentiment is scored according to Over-arching reaction, Energy-level and demonstrated Trust. Given the margin of error for existing natural language processing (NLP), Sentiment Analysis and the complexity of assessment.

In the next part of our series, we’ll explore the other dimensions of Social Intelligence and share some of our proprietary Social Intelligence data visualizations. As always, if you have any questions, see any holes, object to or rally behind anything you’ve read, let us know in the comments section and we’ll address the with alacrity!

Tags: marketing channel, Social Intelligence Engine, social media analysis, Social Media Measurement, Social Media ROI, Social Media Strategy

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 10:05 PM by MattC and is filed under Strategy and Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.