This document discusses the future of measuring social media and online engagement. It notes the massive scale of social media activity today, with billions of users and terabytes of content shared each month. However, it warns that while data is plentiful, making sense of it and taking meaningful actions can be challenging. It advocates for clear measurement goals aligned with business objectives, benchmarking performance, and focusing on impact over just outputs. Creative approaches are encouraged to make data meaningful and drive strategically useful insights.

1. THE FUTURE OF MEASUREMENT Colin Wheeler, Waggener Edstrom

2. WHAT ARE WE MEASURING? PLUS… 140 million tweets per day

3. NO SURPRISES, BUT… 175 million registered users 600 tweets per second 500 million users 30 billion pieces of content shared each month (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) 100m+ professionals around the world 13 million hours of video uploaded in 2010 2 billion views a day – 70% of traffic comes from outside USA Total identified blogs: 158,360,910 ? ? ?

4. ‘OLD’ MEDIA IS STILL HERE With the prevalence of social media activity, it is hard to remember digital isn’t ‘that’ mainstream The cost of providing content for traditional media is still higher than online media

5. LOTS OF TOOLS TO MEASURE ONLINE SOCIAL MEDIA

6. BUT… We are flooded with information, and are under pressure to deliver processed information and actions Website/IT Corporate Comms Marketing CustomerResearch Legal

7. NEED TO…PAUSE FOR BREATH Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wheatfields/4754350449/

9. Spending more time thinking about the impact

10. Identifying more action as an outputPerhaps this is all just too hard?!

11. WHY SHOULD WE BE MEASURING? COMMS MESSAGING EFFECTIVENESS REACTIVE BRAND PROTECTION CUSTOMER SERVICE CHANNEL INFLUENCER IDENTIFICATION

12. GETTING IT RIGHT – BACK TO BASICS It is important to be clear - what gets measured gets done Align measurement with company goals and the goals of the activity Measurement is a strategic decision – don’t measure without purpose Defining the campaign objectives is the first taskHow you measure the objectives is the second

13. BE CREATIVE IN YOUR MEASURES Benchmark! Similar campaigns, competitors, change over time Customise your measurement goals to your needs Be flexible – pick the data and tools that match the objectives Look for synergies with other data e.g. sales, web-traffic, tracking research, traditional and online media Integrate across all activity – marketing communications, PR, industry and competitor stories

14. HAVE FUN WITH YOUR OUTPUTS It is easier to get the message across if data is displayed meaningfully. e.g. Ripple effect charts showing the amplification of messages and which influencers create the biggest impact.

15. WE’s new Social Graph tool defines who is influencing the influencer, and through which digital media channels.

16. THE HUMAN ELEMENT Decide on your resource model: Is this an in-house task or an agency task? What do you want as outputs from the analysis team? How are you resourced to take action on the results?

17. GET OPINIONATED Tell the story - digital data measures are often quantitative, hard numbers: Look across datasets, look for consistencies in the different viewpoints to confirm that the hypothesis of impact is valid Get opinionated, be action-orientated

19. BIG CONSEQUENCES FOR GETTING IT RIGHT Share across teams, keep everyone informed Learn from each round of activity and monitoring – do it better next time

20. Recent trends: POLYMATHS In a world of multi-media exposure, multi-tasking, where we’re all creative – videos, blogs, photos – polymaths are very much at home. People who cast their nets widely, share thinking (not data) widely throughout their business, are willing to experiment, never stop learning and can work effectively in an inter-disciplined way are really interesting to work with, to follow on twitter, to interact and share with.

21. Recent trends: A CLEAN SLATE? How would we do this again? What would or could it look like? New Scientist has asked the question about Nuclear Power and the connection between the military development of Nuclear and the non-military requirements Monocle magazine takes a wider look with it’s ‘Global Rethink’ issue, looking at businesses which re-invent themselves HBR discusses failure – understanding it and learning from it

22. Get in touch cwheeler@waggeneredstrom.com @Colin_Wheeler