Social Media Measurement: Mission Critical for Customer Intelligence

At a time when standards in online audience measurement are non-existent, giving publishers the latitude to self-define what it means to be number in any one particular category, is it appropriate to start another front in the war on audience measurement, or more accurately, audience engagement?

Well, you might as well have all your battles now rather than wait for a type of Cold War peace to break-out, leaving unresolved issues to remain simmering below the surface.

So it is with social media, that most personalised of content types, where peer-to-peer communications is the setting and word-of-mouth is both saint and sinner for enterprises and brands.

The volume of commentary, let alone the speed or velocity of opinions, comments and reviews, is dramatically affecting the nexus between corporate media and multi million-dollar marketing budgets. So aside from simply generating awareness, the core metrics of acquisition, retention, churn and frequency are increasingly being tested and strained by ‘influencers’ who are well outside the control of the corporate-marketing complex.

Enter the social media complex, where network economics dictates that the value (read: influence and market power) of the network is proportional to its size (membership) and activity (recency) levels of members. This represents a real pressure on brands and businesses and deserves analysis.

A recent post on the CRS Score demonstrates that a customer’s behavioural profile will remain incomplete without ‘that social’ component, where the semantics, tone and issues being discussed/posted by the customer will have a bearing on their classification as customer. Google’s recently announced Social Graph API (in conjunction in its Open Social platform) is a powerful step in this direction.

A recent survey by the Aberdeen Group demonstrates that in the context of social media measurement, there are practices defined as ‘best-in-class’. Enterprises which seek to mine social media for customer insights, competitor intelligence and product research/development are classified as best-of-breed. Clearly, if these customer insights can be combined other individual metrics like clicktream and registration data, then the capacity of the enterprise to optimise customer knowledge will only enhance engagement, retention and individual profitability.