JustSignal – Brian Roy

A Simple Prescription for Social Media ROI

The consensus seems to be that creating an ROI for Social Media is hard. I’d like to suggest that it isn’t.

Formulating an ROI is a very simple formula – and until someone can rationally explain why Social Media is different I’ll get out my cookbook.

Define the desired outcome (e.g., increase conversion rate by 3%).
Define the specific actions that will be taken (e.g., offer specials via blog, Twitter and Facebook with specific landing pages).
Define the metrics and measures that will be used to determine if the actions taken were the proximate cause of the result.
Perform the actions and analyze the metrics and measures.
Determine cost of actions and the value of the resultant change in the outcome.

The flaw in most approaches to Social Media ROI happens on the very first step. If you can’t assign real value to the desired outcome you can’t create an ROI. A perfect example is “We’d like to double our followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook”. Some people will call this a “soft ROI” – which is simply another way of saying that the desired outcome can not be assigned a real value, but affects another metric that can. The relationship between the desired outcome (more followers/fans) and the real value metric (sales) is usually highly theoretical – our just plain wishful thinking. If you believe more followers or fans equates to higher sales – say so. Design your ROI experiment and prove it.

The other flaw is in step 3. Failing to adequately define the input metrics (the metrics that are the proximate cause of the change in outcome) leads to an ROI that does not bear scrutiny. Examples of poorly defined input metrics are:

Increase our Social Media Presence
Get more engagement
Have better sentiment about our brand
Be influential in our space

Avoid those two traps and you’ll be well on your way. But there is one mistake I see more than any other:

Stop trying to create a “pure” or “standalone” Social Media ROI!!

Another way to put this – in terms of our recipe above – is:

If your desired outcome is a Social Media metric or measure – think again.

I’ll end the suspense for you right now, it doesn’t exist. The only way to ROI a Social Media effort is by showing that your Social Media effort is the proximate cause of a change in a fundamental business metric (e.g., sales, conversion rate, leads generated, churn, etc).

CRM is a great example of this – I was involved in dozens of large footprint CRM deployments. Well over half of those were done based on a solid ROI – but it had nothing to do with customers. The ROI was based purely on cost savings in IT. Do I believe those deployments had other benefits which were harder to measure and quantify? Sure. But the way to prove the investment had a return was to focus on what was proven, repeatable and tangible.

I think Social Media is much easier to ROI than CRM was. I don’t think we will end up creating ROI based on savings in IT. I am, however, certain that the ROI will have to point to real dollars saved or real dollars generated.

I’m convinced that when you focus on determining which Social Media metrics are the proximate cause of change in core business metrics you’ll find an ROI – and I’m betting it will be both larger and more diverse than you would have predicted.

AZ Small Business, Innovation, Tech

TweetsForBoobs – How justSignal Helped Make it Happen

Reposted from the justSignal Blog (http://justsignal.com)

Sometimes the best way to illustrate how justSignal can accelerate your strategy is by providing concrete examples of how others have accelerated theirs.

TweetsForBoobs is raising money for the Susan G. Komen foundation by encouraging folks to tweet the #tweetsforboobs hash tag on Twitter. It is the brain child of Chase Granberry and Josh Strebel – justSignal (and I for that matter) claim no credit for the idea or it’s successful execution.

In the interest of full disclosure, we did donate justSignal to TweetsForBoobs.

TweetsForBoobs needed four things in order to complete their vision.

A way to capture Tweets about the site and with the hashtag
The ability to put those Tweets on the site in real time.
A way to count how many times a Twitter User used the hashtag.
A way to measure the effectiveness of their efforts.

justSignal, because we focus on the complete Social Media Lifecycle, was uniquely suited to get them there – fast.

TweetsForBoobs was able to create a Signal that pulled in the content they were interested in. They were also able to – using our Exclusion Engine – remove spam and re-tweet bots from their Signal.

In order to create an engaging user experience on the site TweetsForBoobs dropped in and customized our real-time Twitter widget.

Using our API service, TweetsForBoobs was able to pull in all mentions of the hashtag and the site in near real-time. This enabled them to count how many times each user tweeted the hash tag and update the site with current pledge totals.

Finally, TweetsForBoobs wanted to have some information (analysis) that gave them some indication of how the campaign was going. Since every Signal comes with our SignalReports (SignalMeter, SignalDensity and User Activity) they had basic who, when, and how much information.

That is execution of the complete Social Media Lifecycle enabled by justSignal.

Signal – Getting the #tweetsforboobs content.
Engagement – Using our Widgets to put the content on the site, and using the API to create site specific information.
Analytics – Using our SignalReports to gauge the effectiveness of the effort.

What makes TweetsForBoobs even more interesting is that they clearly show the benefit of our approach to data and analytics. When Chase wanted to understand the “Reach” of the hashtag he wasn’t confined by the data we provide “out of the box”.

The data is yours, when you have a question we don’t answer – because it is the really, really important kind, those specific to your business, company, product or service – you have access to the entire data set and the unfettered ability to mine out what is important to you.

You can read Chase’s excellent summary of the data and his thoughts on justSignal at the Authority Labs Blog.

What about action?

That is where you come in… head over to TweetsForBoobs or just grab your favorite Twitter client and send a tweet with #tweetsforboobs in it. Every time you do you pledge $1.00 to the Susan G. Komen foundation.

Analysis, Tech

The Business of Social Media – Better Decisions (NOT Better Reactions)

The prevailing wisdom is clear. Social Media is for “Listening” (which is code for brand monitoring) and Marketing. I won’t make any attempt to talk about Marketing – since today everything seems to be a tool/platform for marketing. I will however talk about this notion of “Listening”.

There are two (and only two ways) to sell something, opportunity and fear. Objectively fear is easy – all you have to do is figure out what your target market is afraid of and make your product a way to alleviate that fear. Sadly, this is the state of the “Listening” segment of the Social Media consulting/tools market today.

CEO’s are terrified of Social Media. The feel they can’t predict when their “Motrin Moment” will occur or why – and the Social Media “experts” are no help:

Maybe you’re not even ready for full-time social media monitoring. That’s your call. But not tuning in while you launch a new tactic borders on gross negligence, in this day and age.

From Pistacio Consulting

Negligence – that is a powerful and scary word. One thing no CEO wants to hear when facing the board is the word Negligence.

The problem for the Social Media Experts and “Listening” vendors is this, if the fear isn’t real, if it doesn’t turn into an actual negative business outcome those same CEO’s will quickly learn to ignore it as noise. The problem is, none of the high visibility Social Media brand events have had any tangible negative business impact.

Here is Johnson and Johnson’s Stock Chart for the last year:

The Motrin Moment occurred on November 16th 2008. I can’t discern an appreciable change in stock price following the event. While I couldn’t find any public data which specifically detailed Motin’s month by month sales numbers – I’d feel pretty safe saying that there was no appreciable change.

Another great example is the “United Broke My Guitar” incident. On July 6th a United customer posted a video on YouTube featuring a song about how United broke his guitar and failed to resolve the issue to his satisfaction. That video has 5.5 million views so far, has been cross posted on MSNBC, Huffington Post, and played on air on CNN and others.

Here is United Airlines Stock Chart for the last 6 months:

Shockingly, UAL’s stock price has more than doubled since the Social Media event. United hasn’t released a new quarterly report since July 23rd – so ticket sales numbers are not publicly available, but based on the stock’s performance and current guidance from UAL management – I’d (again) feel pretty safe saying there was no appreciable negative change.

What is clear from these two high profile Social Media events is that they have little or no impact on a brand – by the only meaningful measure – revenue, and return of value to share holders.

What can damage a brand isn’t the isolated incident that creates Social Media Buzz. What damages a brand is consistently making bad decisions which make your product or service less useful, less valuable to your target market. For brands there is no “Waterloo” moment (thank @jaybaer of Convince and Convert for the quotable moment). There is only the slow agonizing descent into irrelevance that occurs when you make bad decisions over and over again.

The real value of Social Media for businesses is in the ability to make better decisions – not reacting to bad decisions already made.

Every business needs better information upon which to make those decisions – every business can benefit from better understanding the needs, aggravations, and problems of their target customer. Every business can improve their decision making processes by driving the information found in Social Media into every decision making process in the company.

The challenge with this approach is that it is far more Six Sigma than sexy. It will force vendors, consultants and companies to work harder, be open to information that contradicts the prevailing wisdom and invest significant time and resources into extracting the information that is meaningful to their business and their decision making processes.

This isn’t terribly different than the original aim of CRM. And it isn’t terribly controversial. What it is is the opportunity selling position in the Social Media Tools market. It is time for Social Media consultants and vendors to ditch the hype and scare tactics and get down to business… the business of creating value for companies by helping them avoid Motrin Moments by making better decisions consistently.

Tech, Uncategorized

It is ALIVE – Twitter Search is Back To Full Speed

Not sure what was going on, and there was no mention of it on the Twitter status blog, but it now appears that Twitter Search (and the search API) is back to full speed. There is no question that all day yesterday and and today up until 12:00 Pacific Twitter search was not indexing all Tweets.

Download now or preview on posterous

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Unless of course all the Twitter users just took an 30 hour nap…

We will keep an eye on it and keep you updated here.

Posted via email from justSignal Status & Updates Blog

Tech, Uncategorized

Something is DEFINITELY Not Right with Twitter Search

I get hourly emails that show me (graphically) how much justSignal “collects” total from each of the services (Twitter, Blog Search, Backtype, etc). The thing about these graphs is they are amazingly consistent over time – that is why we use them… you can quickly see a change in the normal trend.

Yesterday I noticed that Twitter’s graph looked funny and that the volume was way down from a typical day (on a typical day we collect ~150 thousand tweets). This morning that trend has continued:

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A normal day is a nice smooth curve up from about 2 or 3 am through mid day… like this:

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Also worth noting, our total volume of Tweets collected yesterday was the lowest it has been in 60 days. Normally I would chalk this up to normal variation, but the percentage change from Monday to Tuesday was 50% – and that is unprecedented day over day change. You should also note that http://search.twitter.com provides an exact tweet for tweet match (in our limited sampling) to what we are collecting via the API – so this appears to be a global Twitter Search issue.

This seems to be affecting Trackers with high volume traffic on Twitter – so many of you will not notice any change. If however, your tracker regularly pulls in 10,000 tweets per day it appears that your volume will be cut (roughly) in half.

Obviously all of this is anecdotal and I’ve received no confirmation from Twitter that there is any issue. We will stay on top of it and keep you updated.

NOTE: No, we are not being rate limited – we are, in fact, using less than 10% of our whitelisted request limit per hour. All requests to Twitter Search API are returning normal response codes and, in most cases, tweets – just not nearly as many as just 2 days ago.

Posted via email from justSignal Status & Updates Blog

Tech, Uncategorized

The Growth of @DbacksBooth on Twitter

I’ve been watching the Dbacks broadcast team begin to use Twitter to interact with their audience, and I’ve been using justSignal (shameless plug for my product) to track their efforts. Over the last 60 days I’ve watched the effort from the Booth and (I presume) Fox Sports AZ intensify. They’ve been requesting Keys to the Game and answers to the AFLAC trivia question via Twitter.

The early efforts were marked by significant inconsistency and mixed messages both on air, and on Twitter. Just look at the gaps in the graph below.

That being said, it appears that on August 7th or 8th they began to consistently engage. What impresses me is how quickly the efforts bear fruit.

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Look at the growth and the consistency of the growth between August 7th/8th and the 29th. There are consistent jumps of 10 – 20 responses per game.

Two takeaways from this data:

1) Consistency of interaction on Twitter seems to outweigh the on air requests.

2) A very small investment of time from the broadcast team (4 or 5 tweets) generates a relatively large and consistently growing response.

I know in terms of Fox Sports AZ viewership the numbers are pretty small, but at this point the real goal should be to move the trend line in the right direction. If you look at the trend line for the responses to @dbacksbooth on Twitter it tells you everything you need to know – steeply up and to the right.

They are on to something… and the small investments they are making in Social Media will pay large dividends if they keep this up. The real question is, what will they do with this engagement? I have a few suggestions if they’d like to give me a call.

Posted via email from briantroy’s posterous

Tech, Uncategorized

Make Mark Reynolds an All Star – More Analysis

Following up yesterday’s post with more data about the effectiveness of the get out the vote campaign to make Mark Reynolds of the Arizona Diamondbacks an All Star.

First let me say this:

If you haven’t yet (at least 300 times) stop reading this and go vote RIGHT NOW!!!

Ok… now that we’ve taken care of the important business, let’s get to the data.

Here is the updated Tweets Per day including the full day yesterday (July 8th, 2009)

Nice spike in volume on July 8th… it looks like the Twitter campaign for Mark is building some steam. Let’s look deeper into the numbers to see if we can attribute this surge in Tweets to the Vote for Mark Reynolds campaign.

Yep, that is impressive. More than a third of the tweets yesterday mentioned Mark specifically. I think it is safe to say the Vote for Mark Reynolds campaign is driving the increased volume… what else can we see…

Again, a nice chunk of the Tweet volume were “vote” tweets. This is a nice indication of the viral effect. Or to put it in non-Social Media terms, people are clearly talking about the Vote for Mark Reynolds campaign.

This is the graph the Diamondbacks (and more broadly) MLB should be focusing on. Look at the growth in the number of Twitter users (aka people) participating in the conversation… being engaged with the brand. The raw numbers aren’t as important as the trend line… and the trend line is phenomenal.

The million dollar question is, what now. Can the Dbacks and MLB sustain this level of engagement, or will we see a corresponding drop off starting at 4pm today when voting ends? Stay tuned…

One other thing… I personally would LOVE to see this data correlated with the actual votes cast by day/hour. If you’ve got a spare second send @MLB a message on Twitter… point them to this post and tell them you’d love to see that information too!!! I’d be happy to help them put it together.

Tech, Uncategorized

Did John McCain’s Tweet help Mark Reynolds All Star Game chances?

Yesterday Mark Grace and Daron Sutton (CORRECTION: Todd Walsh set up and conducted the interview) managed to get Senator John McCain to endorse Mark Reynolds bid to be the MLB All Star Game Final Vote winner for the National League.

For reference, Senator McCain sent this tweet out at approximately 4pm Pacific (1600). All times in the analysis below are Pacific.

Today @MLB wondered… did McCain’s tweet have any measurable impact?

Well I happen to be tracking all things Diamondbacks using justSignal – my solution for helping businesses both engage and learn from their fans via Social Media (drop me a note if you are interested in signing up). So let’s take a look at the data and see what we can see…

First some background. justSignal collects every Tweet (and YouTube video, Flickr photo, Blog Post and Backtype Blog Comment) about the Dbacks. We cache all this data for 30 days (when you sign up have the ability to download all the data and store it in your own database). So we have 30 days worth of Social Media data stored for this analysis.

The average Tweets per Day for the last 30 days is 334, but to really determine how yesterday (July 7th, 2009) compares let’s take a look at the daily average number of tweets for the last 30 days:

We can see that yesterday (July 7th, 2009) had a much higher than average number of tweets. As a matter of fact, it is the second highest number of tweets in the last 30 days – only surpassed by June 9th (I really need to go check out that day and see what happened).

We, however, are looking for any specific change in the data as a result of McCain’s tweet… so let’s dig deeper.

Here is the average number of Tweets per Hour of day as measured over the last 30 days:

Pretty clear pattern – the number of tweets ramps up a bit before game time and peaks around the end of the game. The ramp is pretty smooth.

Now lets look at the Tweets per hour for yesterday (July 7th, 2009):

The first thing we notice is a marked jump in Tweet volume the hour after Senator McCain’s Tweet (1700 Pacific). The average 1600/1700 hours are 19.8 and 21.7 respectively. Yesterday however, we saw a jump from 18 to 45 in the same period. We also see that the peak number of tweets per hour (83) is well above average. The question is, are these levels unprecedented – or simply normal variations from the average?

When we review hours 16 and 17 over the 30 day period we see several other examples of large jumps. For example, on June 13th the values for hours 16 and 17 were 19 and 38 respectively. On June 16th the values went from 10 to 38. Given those examples I think it is safe to say the volume change yesterday isn’t extraordinary.

The peak hour Tweets – 83 in hour 21 – is also not extraordinary in the sample. For example, on June 12th in hour 20 there were 73 Tweets. On June 30th in hour 17 there were 85 Tweets.

One last statistic… in the last 30 days there are only 26 tweets that mention Senator McCain and the Diamondbacks. Two on June 8th, one on June 9th, 15 on July 7th and 8 so far today.

Given that Senator McCain has nearly 1 million followers I think it is safe to say his endorsement of Mark Reynolds had essentially no impact.

I’d love to tell you Senator McCain’s endorsement was enough to put Mark in the all star game… but that isn’t going to get it done.

Cmon Dbacks Fans!!!!

06/13/2009 16 19

06/13/2009 17 3806/13/2009 16 19

06/13/2009 17 38