Welcome to Melcrum's Social Media Newsletter.

As if proving the value of corporate and internal communications isn’t tough enough, how should you go about validating the investment in social media?

“Measuring the effectiveness of new, electronic media offers many of the opportunities and pitfalls as measuring the more traditional channels,” says the Internal Comms Hub’s measurement expert, Angela Sinickas. “Unfortunately, most of the measures typically conducted focus on activity and not on outcomes,” she adds.

So, what should you be looking to measure? Here are Angela’s tips.

Measures of activities

Many firms offer services or software that reports how often your company name appears in online discussion. Some even categorize the mentions as positive or negative.

And, just as you can measure how many visitors you have to specific pages of your website or blog, you can also quantify how many people are subscribing to RSS feeds for your site. You could also count how many people link through directly to various pages on your website by following links embedded in the RSS feed, and compare this with the number of people getting to those interior pages from your homepage or from common search engines.

Measures of outcomes

But measuring activity is just a starting point. For example, which is more important to know:

• the total number of people who visited a blog; or
• finding out that one reader was a reporter who then wrote a major article affecting your organization, based on information first learned through the blog?

To make more meaningful measurements of new technology, we need to research the impact of the original blog postings or comments on desirable behaviors benefiting your organization:

• External outcomes of blogs might be more people buying your product or applying for jobs at your company, or fewer people organizing protest demonstrations in front of your headquarters.
• Desirable outcomes of internal blogs could be greater sharing of best practices that reduce company expenses or increase revenue.

You could identify if employees’ use of RSS feeds has reduced the amount of time they spend scanning multiple external websites. Then, compare the value of the saved time in terms of payroll, with the cost of setting up the feeds.

How to track outcomes

When measuring the impact of new technologies, start with some type of desirable business result and identify the stakeholder behaviors that will lead to that result. Then, you can apply different techniques to connect the communication method to the results. For example:

• Once some people change their behavior, ask them to what extent different types of communication influenced the change. This will help to see what role the newer electronic media played in comparison to more traditional information sources.
• Use a pilot/control group approach where you promote the new technologies more heavily in some locations than others. Then measure the difference in behavior change and business outcomes between the control groups and the pilot groups.
• On a broader change management survey, ask additional questions about exposure to, and usage of, various communication channels. Using the answers to these questions, you can see if people who frequently visited a blog had more favorable answers to the other survey questions than those who didn’t.

Once you quantify the percentage impact a particular communication approach has had on behavior change, you can calculate the return on investment. The survey questions or differential outcomes of the pilot study will tell you what percentage credit the new electronic media can take for the financial value of the behavior change.

Then just compare that value against the cost of providing the electronic channels.

Best regards,

Alex Manchester
Editor
alex.manchester@melcrum.com

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