Earlier this week the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) launched a framework for Social Media Measurement.

The framework has been designed to help advertisers and agencies apply clarity, structure and standardization to social media measurement.

Broadly speaking the framework suggests that you should first establish Intent (I) . This element demands that a set of objectives be established, which can then determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are most relevant to success.

The IAB framework then suggests that the KPIs are grouped according to the 4 As (A)– awareness, appreciations, action and advocacy.

Your intent will provide guidance on the relative weightings you accord to each of these and hence which KPIs you should focus on.

For example, if your intent is to create leads, then you should assign more weight to the action metrics. If your activity is designed to generate buzz and WOM, then you might focus on the awareness, appreciation and advocacy metrics.

Finally, the framework suggests that you benchmark (B). In other words you compare your metrics with other SM activity, channels, industry averages, competitors, historical data, etc to provide context and meaning.

Here at NMHQ, I’m always interested to see an attempt to provide some rigor to SM measurement and I genuinely appreciate that this is not an easy task, so this critique is intended to provide honest feedback and I hope that by outlining my impressions on this framework I am in some small part contributing to furthering the discussion rather than stifling it!

With that said here are my thoughts on the IAB Framework:

• Firstly, the fit to the IAB mnemonic seems a bit contrived. I think the elements that they propose are sound but it does make you wonder if subtleties were sacrificed for to achieve a zingy aide-memoire.

• The idea of weighting your metrics according to your intents gives some focus to the measurement – this is important; the lists of stats you could pull is endless and linking them back to your objectives means that you reach the ones that really matter.That’s not really rocket science in itself, but the core of what most measurement frameworks provide is a rationale and mechanism for applying this (the wonderful Jenni Lloyd terms these buckets – and this is by far the best metaphor that I’ve heard for this).

  The four As framework is a reasonable attempt at this, but you might prefer the Altimeter approach, which has ‘buckets’ for; fostering dialogue, promoting advocacy, facilitating support and spurring innovation.

  Or you might prefer Avinash Kaushik’s system that ties metrics directly to the core business variables of; price, cost, unit margins and unit volumes.

  I’m not sure it really matters which you choose as long as you tie your activity and metrics as tightly as you can to your objectives (use a double knot if you must!) and assign those metrics to the relevant buckets so you can prioritise them and give them some context against your bottom line.

• The real meat in the IAB framework is the way in which they define and allocate common KPIs. To do this, they assign KPIs using a combination of the 4 As, the social media platform and by soft metrics and hard financials.What they provide in practice is a set of tables identifying common KPIs and fitting them to their framework that you can use as a starting point for your own framework. Here is an example of their microblogging KPIs:

Now that’s useful! They also do this for social networks, blogs, blogger outreach, apps/widgets, sharing, SM advertising and podcasts – that’s a pretty handy toolkit!

• My final thought (and this applies to all of the frameworks I’ve seen thus far) is that the focus seems to be on measuring owned spaces.I can guess why this is – ‘ambient buzz’ (or conversation about your brand that happens in spaces other than that which you own or control) is notoriously hard to measure and even harder to assign hard financials to – after all, what is the cash value of a positive customer review or an averted PR crisis?However, one of the key teachings in Social Media 101 is that your customers will be having conversations about you in social spaces whether you like it, or not, and whether you choose to listen and engage, or not.

  We encourage our clients to listen to these conversations, to start dialogue with customers and to learn from them. We also assume that social media activity in owned spaces will have a positive brand impact that will be echoed in non-owned spaces.

  Not convinced? Think about all the ‘ambient buzz’ around Old Spice Man if you were the agency responsible you’d sure as hell want to include all that goodness in your reporting!

  With this in mind, I’ve borrowed the IAB model to try and create a KPI set for non-owned spaces.

  It’s more focused on soft metrics than hard financials. This is pretty contentious but I think it’s justified. Bear with me on this one…

  Firstly, the IAB has made an attempt to capture financial metrics for the owned spaces. This makes sense – the metrics are harder and the spend usually warrants this level of reporting.

  For non-owned spaces it is a little different. Because this is ambient buzz, there is no associated spend to justify (outside of engagement time, which is the one KPI I have attempted to attach a financial metric to).

  Anyhow, here it is – this is not yet complete, and I’d love your input – but it’s a start!

Image credit: Misstinykitten

It brought together people from all sorts of groups, from not-for-profit organisations like the Parent Pupil Partnership, regional government agency Social Enterprise London and social business consultants like Rob Greenland

Why? To begin to collaboratively work out how to better demonstrate and measure social impact – something wikipedia describes as: “In business and government policy, social impact refers to how the organisation’s actions affect the surrounding community”.

Started by Ben Matthews, founder of the amazing volunteer-led communications agency Bright One, it’s been inspired by Measurement Camp – the monthly meetup to discuss measurement and social media.

Social Impact Camp follows a similar format (brief presentations, breakout groups and general discussion) but also stems from a similar need.

Measurement Camp came about (kicked off by Will back in 2008) because those working in social media knew that what they were doing had value and an impact, but that there are ways to improve how success is tracked and measured – and that sharing knowledge is going to get benefit everyone.

It was clear from this meetup that organisations working to create a positive social impact feel the same about what they’re doing.

Even though it was the first event, with a group of people who’d never met before, the discussion was lively, interesting and useful.

We talked about the challenges in aligning the reporting needs of your stakeholders with what actually indicates real-world success, how putting a set of metrics in place can risk inadvertently molding your activity to fit, and the problems in consistently measuring things like the changes in someone’s perception of their opportunities in life.

I went along partly because we’re working on a project where metrics for success are going to be based on social capital and social return on investment (which deserves a post in itself) and because it’s going to help bring new ways to measure value beyond the bottom line to the third sector and public sector clients we work with

If I took one thing away from the evening it’s that measuring this stuff is clearly complicated, straddling quantitative and qualitative, online, offline and the inner world of individuals, but that if we can better demonstrate the value and ongoing need for people, projects and organisatons that add value to the world around us, then we’ll generate even more support for them.

Can’t wait for the next one.

For a few days before Christmas, deep within the NixonMcInnes Skunkworks, a band of elves were busy developing something special based upon some newly released Wordpress functionality. Behold, our new plugin, Sentimeter!

At the end of December Wordpress 2.9 was released with newly added support for comment metadata. We though it would be great to build a plugin that utilized this new feature and it also happened that a client of ours needed a plugin that that used comment meta data, everyone is a winner.

The resulting plugin is called Sentimeter. In the words of Steve the plugins main author (and lead developer here at Nizomk):

This plugin allows users to express sentiments (a la getsatisfaction.com, e.g. happy, neutral, outraged etc.) through the WordPress commenting system. Users can also associate their comment with a pre-defined ‘topic’. Overall sentiment, and comment topics, can be viewed as pie charts in the admin system, within a user-defined date range. Additionally, comments (along with their sentiment, and topic, if specified) can be exported as a CSV for further offline analysis.

You will need to update your templates a bit to utilize the plugin but it is written in the traditional Wordpress ‘loop’ style so it should slot in easily. Check out the plugin homepage for the detailed instructions. As the blurb says, the admin panel allows you to view how your users are feeling via a couple of pie charts, these are rendered in pure HTML using the fantastic gRaphaël javascript library.

We still have a bit of work to do to make the plugin easily customizable (which is still possible if you dont mind getting your hands a little dirty) so look out for updates in the near future. In the meantime, grab the code from here, follow these instructions to install the plugin and get Sentimetering!

I love the focus on getting to the real ROI of social media in financial terms (not followers, friends, fans, retweets, comments…) but it left two questions in my mind:

1) In a large organisation, how realistic is it to benchmark financial performance ‘before social media’ and ‘after social media’? If a large publicly listed company posts great quarterly results after starting a social media programme, could you really assert that social media was the cause when there are thousands of other programmes running in the business to try to cut costs and increase revenue.

2) The presentation says we should try to correlate social media measurements with financial indicators. But there’s the old problem of establishing causation: Did sales increase as a result of positive buzz increasing, or was the company doing some other things right that led to increased sales and positive buzz? It reminded me of this study about the Nissan Pathfinder.

I can see this model working in businesses that are relatively easy to measure like online retail but is it too simple to be a panacea for measuring social media ROI across the board? I’d love to know what others think about this.