Recently I stumbled upon the HBO TV series Tenacious D which featured the fictional stories of the real band formed by comedian Jack Black and Kyle Gass. The comedy rock band was formed in 1994 with the HBO series running during the late 1990s. In 2001, Tenacious D released their first album and saw their single “Tribute” achieve the most success as it was their only song to appear on any of the top 10 charts. “Tribute” told the story of how Tenacious D created the “greatest and best song in the world”. Below is a look at the music video for Tenacious D’s “Tribute”.
So what does all of this have to do with social media? Well, I have noticed an increase in discussions around measuring social media success and I decided I would try to mashup this song with social media to bring some humor to the conversation. The result was “the greatest and best social media campaign in the world” (lyrics below).
This is the greatest and best social media campaign in the world…Tribute
Long time ago me and my team here,
We was brainstormin’ in a dark and cold conference room.
All of a sudden, there shined a customer…in the middle…of the room
And the customer said:
“Create the best social media campaign in the world, or I’ll bash your brand.”
Well me and the team, we looked at each other,
and we each said…”Okay”
And we created the first thing that came to our heads,
Just so happened to be,
The Best Social Media Campaign in the Word, it was The Best Social Media Campaign in the World.
Look at our Twitter account and it’s easy to see
One and one tweets make two, two and one tweets make three,
It was destiny.
Needless to say, the customer was stunned.
Whip-click went his computer mouse,
And just like that, he became a Twitter follower.
The customer asked: “Be you social media experts?”
And we said, “Nay, we are but marketers.”
Ahhh, ahhh, ahhh-ah-ah,
Ohhh, whoah, ah-whoah-oh!
This is not The Greatest Social Media Campaign in the World, no.
This is just a tribute.
The question remains though on how to measure the success of a social media campaign and verify its “greatness”. First, there appears to be two common themes surrounding those that are struggling with measurement – they lack a strategy with clear objectives and/or do not properly define the metrics for success. How many times have you heard a conversation like this?
To avoid this scenario, the first step is defining your objectives (these should line up with your business goals). Once this is completed, you will want to ensure that there are clear definitions across your organization for the metrics used to measure success. For example, if you asked 10 people to define engagement, clicks, impressions, or sentiment as it relates to social media you might find yourself with 10 different responses. Below are some questions to consider when defining your social media metrics.
Questions When Defining Your Social Media Metrics
Engagement
- What user actions are considered a part of engagement? A comment, “like”, ReTweet, @ mention, direct message, registration, etc, all of the above?
- What percentage of your engagement was with your target audience? How will you filter out employees, partners, etc that are participating in the chatter as well?
Clicks
- How will you measure clicks? Shortened URL (i.e. Bit.ly), Google Analytics, Omniture, etc? NOTE: For any option, you will need to understand the limitations of having 100% accuracy. For example, Bit.ly click totals are inflated because it will include the counts from redirects and site analytics such as Google Analytics and Omniture will count clicks from services like TweetDeck as “direct” and not attribute them to Twitter.
Impressions
- How will you define an impression? One follower equals one impression, one fan equals one impression, etc? Will you measure unique or total impressions?
Sentiment
- Will you manually adjust sentiment to take into consideration posts that are inaccurately labeled due to language restrictions or slang? NOTE: Only about 10% of all posts have any sentiment (positive or negative) and most tools are about 65-70% accurate.
Hopefully this helps provide some food for thought around social media measurement. I would love to hear what you think in the comment section below. What other items do you take into consideration when defining your social media metrics?
