By now it’s clear that social has a lot of value for marketers, but it’s still hard to judge just what that means in business terms.
Social measurement is still nascent — which not only makes it tough to judge ROI, but difficult to decide where and how much to spend on the many social platforms out there. How does the value of a Facebook like stack up against a Twitter follow? How do we know if we’re reaching the right B2B audience on LinkedIn?
“The problem with social media is there’s lots of listening tools, but there’s really nothing out there that gives you a score on how you’re doing, breaks it down in terms of the various areas you’re doing well or not doing well, and then gives you a blueprint of where to focus your time and energy,” said John Boynton, the new CMO of Aimia.
Though there are lots of companies that provide social analytics, most of them don’t really offer value judgments on performance, he said. Knowing how many shares and likes a campaign is getting is useful, but it’s time for social measurement to go beyond that, and tell brands whether they’re performing well or poorly.
“In the media world, we have AC Nielsen which helps measure impressions in terms of reach and frequency. In the customer experience world we have J. D. Power who measures different brands inside the country against each other, and globally across multiple countries.”
In social, no one fits that bill, he said. Not yet, anyway.
But there are candidates that show promise. Boynton’s bet is on Toronto tech company Engagement Labs, which publishes a social score, called eValue, based on 250 social signals, including views, user interactions, shares and sentiment analysis across all major social networks.
More than just a score, eValue reports tell brands where they’re excelling in social and where they could perform better. It also provides a ranking of 55,000 global brands, similar to comScore’s monthly Media Metrix rankings, so brands can see how they measure up in their region or category.
Boynton recently suggested forming a CMO steering committee for Engagement Labs, to help ensure eValue is giving marketers what they need. “Marketers will want to know that other marketers have taken a look at this and beaten it up a little bit, and are comfortable with what it is and where it’s going,” he said. “If I’m going to adopt this as CMO for XYZ company, I want to know that one of my peers has had a guiding hand on the whole thing.”
Engagement Labs formed the committee earlier this month, with Boynton as chair. Its membership so far includes Pete Marino, chief public affairs and communications officer of MillerCoors; Chris O’Neill, head of global business operations at Google X; Martin Riley, president of the World Federation of Advertisers; Daryl Simm, CEO of Omnicom Media Group and Gemma Toner, SVP business insights and strategy at Cablevision.
Social brand indices are also provided by social management platforms like Sprinklr and Sprout. But Boynton and his colleagues are looking for something a little stronger: an industry-standard metric and measurement methodology that brands can use to inform investment decisions. Something like Nielsen TV ratings or comScore’s Media Metrix for digital publishing.
Boynton said he and his fellow committee members believe with the breadth of signals that eValue brings together, and the specialization of the company in the analytics field, Engagement Labs is as close as anyone in the industry has come to a realizing that standard.
“There is nobody else developing anything like it, as far as I know,” he said. “Not that I know everything, but I have been digging around a bit.”
