Align Social Media Metrics with Your (True) Business Goals the Art and Science of Measuring the Social Web

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Align Social Media Metrics with Your (True) Business Goals The Art and Science of Measuring the Social Web

Unica® NetInsight® is a next-generation web analytics solution The social media challenge has also impacted web analysts who, designed from the ground up to meet the full range of online analysis more than ever, are facing questions of what can be measured and requirements for business today. NetInsight features a fundamentally how. But often, there is neither a clear business goal nor an action different, and dramatically simpler, approach to collecting the data plan behind the question. needed to understand online visitor behavior, while providing unpar- alleled flexibility for reporting and analysis. That makes NetInsight “Even more so than with traditional web analytics, the ideally suited for social media analytics where traditional website maxim holds true with social media that “not everything that analytics need to be extended to cover visitor interactions on or from can be measured is worth measuring and not everything that social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, or viral Video. is worth measuring can be measured.”

Social media are challenging and humbling because they turn the traditional approach to marketing (i.e. push marketing) on its head. While discussions about how to use social media effectively are In order to structure the selection of analytics for social networks, often clouded by confusion and buzz words, what’s needed is a top- micro-blogging, blogs, and videos in a meaningful way, Unica down approach for defining and pursuing clear business goals with recommends defining the business goals that your company is social media. pursuing with its social media marketing effort. Then requirements for measurement and analysis can be derived and prioritized to match those business goals.

Business Goal Overview Typical Key Metrics

Brand advertising Even though the biggest opportunity with social media • Reach and frequency, e.g. unique users and for awareness is thought to be in facilitating conversations, it is obvious views of your Facebook application or Twitter that many marketers are still approaching social media in followers a way that is more similar to traditional advertising or PR. • Engagement, e.g. number of comments or links Companies doing this should then look at typical advertis- on a post ing metrics to measure and improve success. • Share of voice • Quality of the audience that you are reaching, e.g. demographic fit

Direct response Still with traditional marketing methods in mind, marketers • Click-throughs advertising for often post tweets or blog articles with the goal of trigger- • View-throughs ing a direct response, e.g. a registration to an event or an demand generation • Outcomes, e.g. conversions, revenues, ROI alert to a current promotion.

Viral marketing for The opportunity to increase the reach and effectiveness of • “Virality”, e.g. re-tweets on Twitter, application awareness and your marketing messages through viral distribution repre- invitations on Facebook, or pick-up of your marketing messages across the blogosphere thought leadership sents both the most exciting and also the most challenging aspect of social media. The networked nature of social • Social graph of visitors reached by your effort, media makes them ideally suited for viral multiplication e.g. the number of their friend connections effects. Companies that know how to facilitate conversa- • Sentiment tions and how to build their brands through the voices of • Context of the conversations about your brand their customers stand to build the best brands. and products

Unica Corporation | www.unica.com 1 Business Goal Overview Typical Key Metrics

Focus group for It is often said that: “On traditional media you can shout • Volume of chatter on various topics, marketing understanding but you cannot listen. On social media you cannot shout messages, ad campaigns, or competitors that relate to the company’s business market preferences but you can listen.” Marketers that take this idea to heart will find in social media a giant focus group that provides a • Sentiment vs. your products and messaging window into the hearts and minds of the market place. • Context of the conversations

Customer service Some social media channels, especially Twitter or blogs, • Volume and value of customer cases handled for customer provide the opportunity to respond or comment directly • Improvement in customer satisfaction or net satisfaction and to the individuals that posted an article. This opens up the promoter score reputation opportunity to encourage and thank fans while reach- • Custom retention and increase in lifetime value management ing out to help customers that are in need of help or feel disgruntled.

Social CRM for The opportunity to make social marketing personal ex- • Topical keywords that relate to an identified growing lifetime tends beyond manual customer services. Namely, there individual’s posts on Twitter, blogs, etc. value and increasing is an opportunity for interactive marketing. Social media • Topical keywords that relate to the posts with engagement are part of the interactions and experiences that individu- hyperlinks to your website from which an als have with your brand. It is commonly accepted that individual has clicked through to your site marketers should listen to their clients so that they can be • An RFR (Recency, Frequency, Reach, (i.e. relevant in their communications instead of interrupting social graph) model for scoring individuals with untargeted messages. As such, individuals’ interactions with your brand on social media represent another great channel for listening to individual customers and taking their interests into account.

This overview reveals that meaningful social media measurement depends on a variety of key metrics that require combining data from multiple sources. The following data sources are essential:

1. Typical web analytics metrics from Unica NetInsight such as unique visitors, click-throughs, and outcomes such as conversions and revenues. 2. Data about social media participants such as their demographic profile or number of friend/follower connections. This information would typically be available from the APIs of social media platforms or from social media monitoring solutions. The information can be integrated into Unica NetInsight for a more complete view. 3. Social media monitoring analytics such as the volume of chatter around specified topical keywords as well as sentiment estimates. The metrics can be viewed side by side with web Unica NetInsight enables an integrated view of social media success. metrics after obtaining them from social media monitoring solutions and integrating them into Unica NetInsight.

Unica Corporation | www.unica.com 2 SUMMARY Social media are top of mind for marketers today, but there is much to learn before mastering this new marketing venue. Effective, meaningful analytics can play a key role in helping you manage your approach to social media and how to improve it over time. As always with analytics, it is vital to align the metrics that you track with your business goals to avoid “analysis paralysis”.

Aside from picking the right metrics, a thorough approach to social media metrics requires collecting the data behind those metrics. For this reason, you need to combine a wide variety of data sources including web analytics, social media monitoring, and other available details from social media platforms such as users’ social graphs, etc.

For web analytics solutions, an open architecture that lends itself to extending traditional web metrics with additional data is paramount. Unica NetInsight provides an open and flexible data architecture as one of its next-generation advantages. For more information on all of Unica NetInsight’s advantages, read Unica’s whitepaper, Next- generation Web Analytics.

About Unica Unica Corporation (NASDAQ: UNCA) is the recognized leader in marketing software solutions. Unica’s advanced set of enterprise marketing management and on-demand marketing solutions empowers organizations and individuals to turn their passion for marketing into valuable customer relationships and more profit- able, timely, and measurable business outcomes. These solutions integrate and streamline all aspects of online and offline marketing. Unica’s unique interactive marketing approach incorporates customer analytics and web analytics, centralized decisioning, cross- channel execution, and integrated marketing operations. More than 1,000 organizations worldwide depend on Unica for their marketing management solutions.

Unica is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts with offices around the globe. For more information, visit www.unica.com.

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