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Social Media Measurement

What Is a Social Network and Why Does It Matter?
Or... What's the ROI of my living room?

by Katie Delahaye Paine

As everyone who has talked to me recently knows, I'm a serious social media evangelista. And as I travel around I'm constantly confronted with business people who say: "Social media? I don't get it! Who has time? Why should I bother?"

My simple answer has always been that blogging (or Twitter, or Facebook) is a way to engage in a conversation with your customers or your employees.

(And if, Mr. CEO, you do not want to engage your customers or your employees, you deserve to be fired. If not shot.)

But I've been told that that attitude isn't particularly helpful when you're talking to people who think Facebook is still "just a college thing," and who think "twittering" must be something dirty.

So here's my new explanation (a bit long-winded, but, please, bear with me here):

When I built my house, it was designed to be the capital of social capital, with a huge living room and kitchen and dining room so that lots and lots of people could gather there. As that's just what happened:

• When I moved in, I threw a party and lots of people showed up. As always happens at parties, different groups of people gathered in different nooks and crannies of the house to talk about what was interesting to them.
• A few months later, my best friend had her wedding at the house, saving her the expense and aggravation of renting a hall. Lots of people showed up to wish the newlyweds well and to share their stories and experiences.
• A little later, we had a benefit for the Durham Public Library. The author Joyce Maynard spoke, the place was packed, and the library more than tripled its mailing list.
• A lovely lady named Carol Shea-Porter decided to run for Congress and we did a fundraiser at my house. She told the crowd, "I'm not asking for your money, I'm asking for your votes. If I have your votes, I don't need the money." She was outspent 5 to 1, but we now call her "Congresswoman Shea-Porter."
• Later on, we had a house concert with a hundred or so fans of a local musician. He sold lots of his new CDs and added to his mailing list.

So are you getting my point? Social Media is just a great big version of my living room. Any social network -- Twitter, Facebook or MyRagan -- starts off as one big noisy place. But soon, people of like minds and like interests start to find each other and sometimes they spin off and form their own separate groups.

So What's the ROI of my Living Room?

Which gets us to measurement. The hot topic right now -- and what everyone wants to know -- is: How do you measure the ROI of the effort you put into these groups?

To answer that, let's go back to my living room. The bride and groom's goal was to save money. The Library's was to build their mailing list. The politician wanted votes and the musician wanted to sell CDs. If they wanted to measure the ROI of their events in my living room, they'd compare their investment in effort to the particular return that was important to them.

And What's My ROI for Social Media?

I, on the other hand, use social media, and (often) my living room, to satisfy my thirst for knowledge and intellectual stimulation. Take Twitter: Do I appreciate the fact that traffic on both my blog and my website has picked up since I started Twittering? Absolutely. But mostly I Twitter because it makes me smarter. It allows me to follow interesting people that I wouldn't ever meet in my living room, and who would never read my blog.

I mess around in Facebook because it's a great way to share stuff with my friends and colleagues and it's a huge time saver when you're trying to pull together an event.

I blog because I like having conversations with people – about my business, my services, and the world as a whole.

And that ends my longwinded explanation of why you or anyone might want to bother with social media. It depends on you and your goals. And as for measurement, it's the same as for any marketing effort; first be clear about what you're trying to achieve, then go about measuring it.

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