Here are a few recent nuggets of measurement metal you might find helpful or interesting:

1.     Radian6’s Practical Social Media Measurement & Analysis – In the March issue of their Community eBook, Radian6 puts together a concise and insightful guide to measuring and analyzing the primary objectives of social marketing including Cost Savings, Leads, Conversions and Sales, and Awareness, Attention and Reach.   Each section explains the process and includes example metrics you can use to analyze the performance of your programs and generate clear and visible results.

2.    Dag Holmboe’s Social Media ROI App – Dag has posted a series of Social Media ROI explanations on his blog, and his most recent post demos his Social Media ROI Application, which plugs in specific metrics of your program and spits out some interesting insights into its ROI.  You can demo the lite version of his app here.

3.    Google Analytics on Facebook Pages – This helpful how-to made the rounds late last week, and piqued my interest as I have made it known my disappointment in the current iteration of Facebook Insights.  I highly recommend this read and testing out Google Analytics on your Facebook page for further insights into referrals, visitor statistics, and more.

4.    Omniture Partners with Facebook – AdWeek announced last week that Omniture will be adding Facebook advertising data to its dashboard, allowing for greater insights and comparisons against campaigns running on other networks like Google.  This is great news; however, I tend to agree with KD Paine’s view that data may be incomplete.  Some of the most successful ad campaigns on Facebook direct users to a Facebook fan page, or the CTA is not a click-through but to fan the page from the ad itself.  Since the action is often not of direct sales, one must measure true success through the relationships developed by way of these conversions such as conversation volume, changes in sentiment, etc. which Omniture will not have.  I’m interested to see where this goes.

If you have additional stories regarding social media measurement and analysis please leave them in the comments!

It appears now that Facebook is ramping up their Insights offering, having debuted a new ‘Impressions’ metric for page admins to sink their teeth into.   Impressions, according to a Facebook spokesperson to AllFacebook.com, is defined as “the raw number of impressions shown to users. These impressions may appear in users’ News Feeds, visits to Pages or through a Fan Box widget.”

As a marketer with a soft spot for hard metrics I’m not amped by this.  For starters, this new metric doesn’t give me unique reach, frequency, or placement.  Facebook counts impressions beneath the fold, and when the majority of these impressions are funneled through a dynamic, vertical news feed, it's probable that some of my impressions are displayed below the fold and never actually seen by the user.

Second,  I cannot measure with any certainty the number of impressions that are targeted to my intended audience (fans or friends of fans).  Whether passersby visit my publicly accessible page, or if I have a "Fanbox" widget on a site outside of Facebook, ‘Impressions’ lumps together both fans and non-fans into one big fat super-impressive number.  In a time where measuring reach and interactivity can be pinpointed to the individual user, it seems a bit archaic to use ad-based, unwashed masses metrics.  I know neither who viewed my content nor how it was viewed, if at all.

Targeted messaging and engaging opt-in consumers is a key advantage of a Facebook page as a marketing tactic, so why doesn’t Facebook let me measure that?  I’d like to see how many fans I reached, or friends of fans, and whereabouts in the news feed my status update appeared; or integrate more specific content update data into the dashboard to better measure performance and sentiment in lieu of the ambiguous ‘Post Quality.’ I could think of a laundry list of metrics I would rather have seen with this update than ‘Impressions.’  I’m disappointed.

Unfortunately Facebook plays host to more than 400 million people and as long as they provide an outlet for brands to engage with this audience, I will take whatever insights Facebook provides.  They've hinted at more sophisticated updates in the past, I just hope more of these updates are in the offing so we can stop regressing and start advancing our measurement standards.

I recently returned from WOMMA's Word of Mouth Marketing Summit in Las Vegas. It was a fun (yet sleepless!) few days and it's always great running into/reconnecting with familiar faces as well as meeting new ones.

Historically, these events have always left me invigorated and full of new ideas. But this time, something felt... "different" (and it wasn't the shots of Petron that we did at the Wynn just a few hours earlier after an all-night Blackjack marathon )

In the opening "State of WOM Address" given by WOMMA President John Bell, he said something along the lines of the word of mouth marketing industry reaching a "tipping point". I think what he meant was that WOM is about to transition from a "niche" form of marketing and a tiny part of the overall marketing mix to a more "mainstream" tactic that is on the top-of-minds of any C-level executive.

Yes! I agree 100%! But after two days of panels and networking with people from a variety of backgrounds (brands, agencies, services), I started to wonder, could word of mouth marketing, rather than reaching a "tipping point", be "jumping the shark"?

Thinking back to the "early" WOMMA events (2005), there was an electricity/excitement in the air. It's really hard to explain, but everyone was drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid. The excitement wasn't about what had been done, but about the potential of what could be done. There were far more questions than answers, but that was fine, because it was forcing people to think about things like tactics, metrics, and business models. And for brands, how can they sell WOM to their boss and how do they budget for it?

Flash forward 3.5 years - word of mouth marketing has matured into a multi-billion dollar industry. There are tons of books, blogs, and even awards dedicated to the concept. So although I didn't find it surprising that audience members (many of whom were new to the industry and first-timers at a WOM-related conference) were asking many of the same questions as back in 2005, the vibe was much less "electric" and more "uncertain", and what surprised me was the lack of concrete answers being provided, in particular with respect to:

• Tactics
• Metrics
• ROI
• Ethics

How can that be possible? Are we, as practitioners, really still figuring things out? Or are we hesitant to share too much info with other agencies/potential competitors (since the event was probably 90% vendors/agencies)?

On the agency/vendor front, are folks jumping into the WOM/SM arena out of true passion/belief or are they just trying to latch on the next "big/cool" thing or make a quick buck? Will the industry simply become dominated by a small group of large PR Social Media agencies? If times become tough economy-wise and competition more fierce, will things like ethics be tossed out the window? Please tell me no!

However, I do truly believe that the industry is at a crossroads. The lines are being blurred between PR, marketing, loyalty/CRM, and customer service as these tactics increasingly overlap. Demanding accountability and establishing consistent metrics among both brands and agencies is the only way to ensure things "tip" rather than "jump". Hopefully this stirs up some healthy dialog - I encourage you to post your thoughts below, or drop me a tweet!

Oh, by the way you can check out all of the live "tweets"/micro-commentary that were posted during the WOMMA Summit by looking for posts tagged #womsum (or just click this link).

One of our current methodologies involves a survey distributed to a randomized sample of a program’s (i.e., community or online consumer panel) members asking questions related to the conversations they’ve had offline in the past month about that brand or product.  One question we recently added to the survey asks, “How likely are you to recommend [product/brand] to a friend or colleague”?

This question probably sounds familiar.  It’s the “Ultimate Question” as defined by Fred Reicheld in his book of the same name.  The Ultimate Question’s purpose is to determine your Net Promoter Score, that is, the ratio of promoters to detractors of your product or brand.  This score is designed to provide the measure of a company’s performance through the customer’s eyes.  It’s a widely accepted, yet controversial metric for determining an organization’s ability to grow.

Here’s how it works.  Consumers are asked, on a scale of 1-10 (with 1 being extremely unlikely and 10 being extremely likely), “How likely are you to recommend an organization to a friend or colleague?”  Those who answer 0-6 are “detractors” and those who answer 9-10 are “promoters”.  You subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters to determine the Net Promoter Score (NPS).

One question we’ve always asked in our WOM surveys has been “How many conversations have you had about [product/brand] in the past month?” with the answer based on a 0-10+ scale.

We decided to dig up 6 months of historical WOM survey results and match the NPS results with our conversation metric to see how they fit together, and were surprised by the results.  Note: All three clients are of different verticals.

Basically, the more conversations a customer has, the more likely they are to recommend the product.  No surprises there.  But what’s most interesting is how conversations mimic the assumed detractor/promoter values of the Net Promoter Score.  According to the historical results of three of our existing clients, those customers who had 0-6 conversations are essentially detractors, unlikely to recommend the product or brand to a friend.  At seven and 8 conversations the NPS spikes, and 9-10 are significantly higher, extremely likely to recommend the  product.

Now admittedly this isn’t a conclusive correlation with only 6 months of historical data, but the striking resemblance of “conversations per month” to the Net Promoter Score begs the question, why are consumers who are having up to 6 conversations per month about a product or brand ‘unlikely’ to recommend the product to a friend or colleague?  Is this a flaw in either our or the NPS methodology?  Are customers over-reporting their conversations or under-reporting their likelihood of recommendation?  Are consumers aware of the difference between a product conversation and a product recommendation?  Share your thoughts with us!