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Nothing has been more important than developing a credible, workable measurement model for ou
social media-based programs at Ogilvy. Having participated in many of the forums where measure-
ment geeks come together to test-drive their models, it became clear last year that we were all stil
the first third of the process. If you think of the inevitable arc of standards development, the first thir
is floating meaningful measures - no matter how convoluted the model - marketers want to know th
there are valuable metrics that even exist to justify spending in word of mouth-based social media.
Conversation Impact
Meanwhile, brands that explore the more complex and more meaningful measurement models inev
™
table backslide into KPIs. You can hear it now from your most senior brand marketers, "Can't we jus
reduce all this complex modeling to 2-3 numbers we care about most? Numbers that reflect how
much reach or how much time people are spending with the brand. What if we just count video view
and Tweets?"
Ogilvy’s Simple, Results-Driven Social Media
Final Third of the SocialMeasurement Model for
Media Marketing Measurement Life Marketers
Cycle
This remains a glimmer in my eye. Once we have the solid and simple modeling out of the second
third, we need to ramp up quickly for the inevitable: complexity. The real power of social media mar
keting is integrated into all sorts of communications and marketing - ALL sorts. What is the impact
social media mentions on the performance of adjacent advertising - does it make the ads perform 3
O g i lv y I n s i g h t 1
Track the
Few Metrics
that Really Matter
With two-thirds of the world’s Internet population now visiting a
blog or social networking site, driving results through social media
has become an important component of the marketing strategy.
In addition to introducing the model below, the following sections walk through some specific
considerations and objectives we worked through.
2 O g i lv y I n s i g h t
Measure
Cross Channel
De-emphasize metrics that don’t allow apples-to-apples comparisons.
Traditional metrics are not readily applicable to the analysis of social media—but are still
being used. Reach/exposure (the number of people exposed to the message) is often used as
a metric related to brand awareness, positioning and preference campaigns. However, word of
mouth (WOM) is consistently trusted more than other forms of communication/marketing1,
so direct CPM or impression-based comparisons are not useful.
Another complicating factor is that simply applying an adjustment factor to a WOM mention
is still not useful because of the varying influence levels of the conveyor of the message. That
is, people trust messages differently based on context (which includes factors such as the
person conveying message, tonality of message and specific content of the message).
Finally, simply reporting “activity” metrics like page impressions, interactions and time does
not help marketers determine whether or not a campaign was successful in driving their
ultimate marketing or communication goals. Even measures of “engagement” cannot connect
activity to core marketing goals.
Conversation Impact simplifies and standardizes measurement in a way that is readily recog-
nizable to marketers, while accommodating both conventional and new metrics and data that
account for these differences in social media.
Provide
Actionable Measurement
that focuses on key goals
There is rich data now available on a continuous basis, including daily data from the semantic
analysis of the millions of conversations in social media. We integrate these analytics into the
model to help drive optimization.
As an example, for a brand positioning campaign, we can evaluate preference and action in ways
that help us understand which social media influencers are adopting which types of messaging
and in which channels. We look at what people voluntarily say and do across the social Web. We
can use this data to help guide ongoing creative and spending decisions.2
Table 1 presents the key representative measures within each of these categories.
Some of these metrics are based on data from social media monitoring software; other metrics
are obtained from server logs, Google and other analytics data, and surveys.
3
Depending on volume and the prevalence of negative discussion, we may look at share of net positive voice,
where net positive voice = brand positive mentions – brand negative mentions
O g i lv y I n s i g h t 5
Preference
• Share of positive voice within category = volume of positive-sentiment mentions for brand/
total volume of positive-sentiment mentions in category
• Can also be compared to/calculated as share of net positive voice, which = volume of (positive –
negative) mentions for brand/total volume of (positive – negative) mentions in category
Action
• Campaign- or influencer-attributable actions
Note that the measures shown are representative, not comprehensive—the key focus of the
model is to use categories and metrics that provide simple, useful data in ways that provide
for ease of comparability and analysis.
4
The denominator may also be modified to include only the brand plus specific competitors
6 O g i lv y I n s i g h t
We employed our social media listening post and survey-based data collection methods for
these campaigns.
O g i lv y I n s i g h t 7
48% 48%
20%
10%
6%
We used a software monitoring product to track and categorize the tonality of social media
mentions around the brand. This product’s algorithm classifies social media discussions based on
a trainable, semantic, natural language-based categorization algorithm and has a high degree of
consistency and reliability in assigning social media mention sentiment and topic relevance5.
Our focus for this measurement program was to evaluate the impact on influencers driving brand
positioning and preference in social media; specifically, we evaluated the number of positive
mentions as a share of total positive mentions within the brand’s competitive set. There were five
competitors identified to be part of the competitive set.
18.2%
18.0% 17.7%
17.0%
17.1%
16.0%
16.2%
4-month Trend
15.0%
5
It should be noted that our team’s approach is software-independent. We set up Social Media Listening Posts™
with underlying software that is the most appropriate for the specific client engagement.
O g i lv y I n s i g h t 9
We believe the model represents a useful step forward in social media impact measurement,
primarily due to its focus on tracking metrics with comparability across different types of
advertising and communications.
As social media increasingly becomes a standard component of both advertising and communi-
cations campaigns, this type of simple, cross-channel comparative framework will become more
useful in answering media allocation questions and helping marketers decide which social
media efforts are worthy of scaling further.
10 O g i lv y I n s i g h t
References
3 Depending on volume and the prevalence of negative discussion, we may look at share of net
positive voice, where net positive voice = brand positive mentions – brand negative mentions.
4 The denominator may also be modified to include only the brand plus specific competitors.
5 It should be noted that our team’s approach is software-independent. We set up Social Media
Listening Posts™ with underlying software that is the most appropriate for the specific client
engagement.
As part of the 360° Digital Influence team at Ogilvy PR, Irfan is responsible for
all aspects of planning and executing on innovative uses of digital media to help
clients achieve global marketing goals.
Irfan’s Digital Influence experience includes both B2C and B2B campaigns, for
clients such as IBM, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, The Heart
Truth Campaign for NIH/NHLBI and Kaplan University. He is also leading the
introduction of a new social media measurement methodology and an
influencer activation product for the group.
Prior to joining Ogilvy PR, Irfan served as Entrepreneur-in-Residence for Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of
Amazon.com. In this role, he was in charge of researching, sourcing and evaluating digital startup investment
strategy and opportunities for Jeff Bezos’ personal investment. Irfan has also founded companies in the preventive
health social networking and media sectors, and has run a digital strategy consulting practice focused on
international aviation.
Irfan further brings several years of energy, infrastructure finance and financial services industry experience in roles
on the project finance and investment banking teams at Bechtel and Merrill Lynch Capital Markets respectively.
Irfan holds an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford and a BSE from Princeton University.
John H. Bell
John heads up the 360° Digital Influence team—Ogilvy PR’s global, digital word
of mouth marketing practice designed to manage brands at a time when
anyone can be an influencer and we are all influenced in new ways. His team
has developed and executed social media strategy for clients as diverse as
TJMaxx, Lance Armstrong Foundation, Lenovo, Unilever and more. The team’s
focus is on engaging through conversations, outreach to new influencers and
word of mouth marketing.
Currently, John serves as the President of the board of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. He teaches
graduate studies in Digital Influence at Johns Hopkins University.