Fifteen-year Mediacom veteran Virginia Pino has joined social media measurement firm Engagement Labs as VP of analytics and insight, with a mandate to get social measurement up to par with well-established channels like television.
Over the last two decades, Pino has been SVP of market intelligence for Mediacom Canada, head of consumer and media insights at Media Experts, chair of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Research Committee, chair of the Canadian Advertising Research Foundation, and an active committee member of the ComScore Advisory Board, BBM Canada (now Numeris) and NADBank.
With Pino’s long history in traditional measurement and market research, recently appointed Engagement Labs CEO Bryan Segal hopes she’ll bring expertise that transcends individual media channels, plus a large helping of credibility, to its social measurement methodology.
Pino said part of her strategy will be to make sure the metrics Engagement Labs emphasizes line up with those that marketers have come to understand and care about in television and digital.
“We’re going to make sure we can discuss social metrics alongside the traditional metrics we have,” she told Marketing. “Trying to make sure that we can link it together, so marketers don’t have to deal with a brand new set of dashboards or a brand new set of information. We want to make sure that it’s all integrated — that’s the key component, is integrating social into overall marketing strategy and overall marketing metrics.
“The questions a marketer asks haven’t changed,” she added. “The first question is, which channel is working? And then once you’ve found a channel that works, it’s about how do I go to market within that channel? How frequently and what format?”
Though social media as a whole has matured, and established channels like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in particular, there is still a lot of confusion about how to value it, and what weight it should receive in a media plan. The confusion primarily stems from fragmentation — success on Twitter doesn’t look much like success on Pinterest, and there’s not really any way to consistently measure results.
That was the problem Toronto entrepreneur Paul Allard founded Engagement Labs to solve back in 2010. Its main product, eValue, is a social reporting tool that provides a range of social metrics and ongoing guidance about how to improve social strategy. As part of this service it provides a composite performance score across Facebook, Twitter and other top social media platforms, to help brands evaluate their social strategy at a very high level.
Pino said despite all this fragmentation, the commonality that links all the various social channels together, and what ties them back to traditional channels, is consumer engagement. Understanding how to use a new platform, and how to measure, is a matter of understanding what engagement means in that channel.
“[Traditional] channels started off with exposure, and quickly realized that pure exposure isn’t going to move the needle in a very big way. So they started adopting metrics of engagement,” she said. “I think [in social] we’re starting with engagement and saying, What else is there?”
Part of Engagement Labs’ mandate is to investigate new social channels as they arise, and find out what strengths they have, what brands can benefit from them, and how to integrate them into holistic media plans. Take Periscope, a Twitter-backed video streaming platform that’s all the rage in adland.
Brands haven’t figured out how to effectively use Periscope yet, since it’s only been out for a week — “Right now it’s very much celebrities and early adopters basically doing video selfies,” Pino said. Compare that to Snapchat or Instagram, which are much further along to the road to maturity and has started working with brands in earnest, or Facebook, which is by now a well-established part of most brand budgets.
Despite the unique features and audience of each of those social platforms, Pino said she sees the same evolutionary cycle at work across channels. But what is changing — and what has changed a lot since her days studying traditional media — is the speed at which channels reach maturity, and the shorter and shorter period marketers have to learn how to use them.
And of course, effective adoption doesn’t just mean knowing the right time to adopt a platform, but whether it’s the right platform to adopt at all. “I’m a firm believer that there’s a time and place for everything. It doesn’t make sense for every brand to be on Facebook, Snapchat or Pinterest, but for some brands it’s critical,” she said. “Each channel, I think, has a role, depending on the clients’ needs. But there’s no one formula that works for everyone.”
