Social Media Strategy - Aligning Goals and Measurements
Since starting a social media strategy series, I’ve been working diligently on understanding what goes into the process. I’m building a framework that, when completed, should prove fairly useful. Along the way, I’ll share some of what I’m learning, so that you can learn along with me, and hopefully influence the end results with your thoughts and ideas. Today, let’s talk about goals, strategies and measurements. We’ll start with a specific goal from my company, go into another basic example, and then open the conversation to you.
You Can’t Have Strategy Without First Having Goals
Strategy is essentially the diet, but the goal might be weight loss, muscle growth, cholesterol reduction, allergy aversion. See how it’s not one-size-fits all? Before you know which diet to start, you need to know the goal.
Strategy Without Measurement is Useless
Further, if you’re not measuring the effort to reach your goals ( KD Paine will be so proud of me), how can you be sure you’re getting there. Measuring the effectiveness of your efforts is vital to knowing you’re making progress. Remember that diets (strategies) often need adjusting along the way. It’s measurements that tell us this.
Sample Goals, Strategies, and Measurements
Let’s put some real information out here and talk about it. I’ll use a few that I’m working up for my own company, CrossTech Media.
- Goal: increase attendance at our live events.
- Strategy: add upcoming.org and Facebook events components, blog, invite local geek groups. Possibly purchase Facebook ads to test that, too, targeting regional. Craigslist?
- Measurements: add a “Where did you hear about us?” field to the registration form.
- Measurements: check link referral logs.
So, that’s fairly straightforward. The only thing I’m missing is some kind of estimate on how much I think these efforts might increase attendance traffic. Truth is, I’m not sure. Should I have a number in mind? I will put one down, but have no idea how close my estimate will be.
But the process is there. I’ve identified a goal: “I want more people to attend our shows.” I’ve laid out a few strategies: “put info about our show in more places.” And I have a few ideas how to measure: “in-line survey, and web links.”
In reserve, I have “blogging” and two other strategies. But I want to lead with these and see if they make a significant impact on their own.
Other Goals, Strategies, and Measurements
There are many other things a company might want to do, and other ways to approach it. Why don’t we list a few out here, and then if you have others you want to talk about, we can tackle them in the comments section.
- Goal: Increase leads for my product / service.
- Strategy : build blog traffic with appropriate links to product / service.
- Measurement : link tracking.
Simple and straightforward, right? I’d offer that the strategy should go further. Remember, “if you blog it, they will come” is not exactly true. That’s where people fall down fast. Instead, I’d add the following to the strategy area:
- Augment blog traffic by adding outposts (referral back to the blog via RSS) on Facebook, in appropriate forums, in LinkedIn, and other pertinent online venues.
- Augment blog traffic by adding useful tools for my audience that might drive more visits to download (like an ebook).
- Augment blog traffic by using social news sites like Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon, where appropriate.
By Having Three Knobs to Turn
If you look at it, splitting out goal, strategy, and measurement means that you can look a little more closely at WHY and HOW and HOW EFFECTIVE your social media efforts are. It’s quite simple, and yet powerful to put this lens on what you’re doing.
I get lots of emails asking me how to improve one’s blog traffic. My first response, almost always, is “what’s the goal with the added traffic?” People blogging casually or for entertainment purposes just want a higher number. But businesses are hoping that more traffic to the blog equals more sales, more engagement, more something-that-translates-into-more-business. In those cases, it’s not always more blog traffic that wins the game. Sometimes, it’s building more effective blog traffic, building more pertinent connectivity, building a stronger process flow to bring readers into your marketplace.
What Are Some of Your Goals?
Maybe you know the goals but haven’t thought out the strategies. Maybe you have some great strategies for achieving your goals. Perhaps you have measurements that I’m not considering yet. In any of those cases, we should talk more about it. Let’s open the comments and see what we can come up with.
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The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
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Comments
Chris.. I just love your post more day by day..
I’m eagerly waiting for your case studies you mentioned sometime back.
I’m working on drafting a bill and pushing it through IL–to provide hearing aid coverage by insurance companies. We’re using a social media approach to this activism and I realize, while we have the goal, we need to tweak our strategy more to make sure we’re reaching everyone we need to in IL.
Off to think about this more.
I’ve been using Goals and Strategy but never really implemented Measurement. That’s something I have to work on. I also have to work on making more social media connections. Great post, thanks. It’s given me some ideas.
Goal for my library’s website: more interaction. We’re getting some, but not much. So far, our strategy is to get on traditional local media outlets (tv, newspaper) to do it, and we’re going to be featured on the cover of the phonebook (I’m making sure out URL is there, too).
What am I missing? Our regulars know we’re there… but the REST of our county are “potential customers” of the library… and of our website.
Ideas are appreciated!
I think the lack of goals is often the biggest weakness. People blog without any real idea of what they are trying to achieve. Even those looking at monetising their blogs don’t have any clear aim beyond “make some money”.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone, and have to kick myself from time to time to think about what I’m trying to achieve, and my strategies for that achievement.
A couple of aspects I’d add:
The splitting of goals into short, medium and long term goals. If you only have long term goals then you can feel demotivated because achievement seems so far away, and its difficult to identify progress. But only having short term goals means a lack of focus once they’ve been achieved.
And it’s also important to constantly re-evaluate your goals as when as your strategy. Changing circumstances, new lessons learned, these not only impact how you go about things, but they can also make your original goals redundant or worth altering. People too often get stuck into the idea of “I set this goal and so I have to move forward” even if circumstances have changed and they can have more success with some flexibility and reevaluation.
Chris,
This was a great post.
In regards to measurement–create a baseline. If this is the first time you are trying these strategies, before putting a number on how much you think it will increase attendance traffic, map out what strategies you used before and what the attendance traffic was then. Once you have your baseline, you’ll be able to see if these new strategies did work and by how much so that going into next month/year/etc. you can look at the percentage of growth. You can even break it down further when sorting through “where did you hear about us?” If you find that one strategy didn’t seem to be mentioned as much as others, it gives you the opportunity to re-evaluate why and either re-tweak it or abandon it all together.
Goal: Increase attendance at a State Fair – particularly among young urbanites, an atypical fair audience.
Strategy: Enhance Facebook and MySpace presence with games, badges and promotion of age-targeted events happening at the fair.
Strategy: Engage the audience with a video and photo contest. Leverage YouTube and Flickr’s technology.
Strategy: Encourage feedback and input from that group. Create a platform (right now it’s a blog) for visitors to submit suggestions about acts and events they would like to see and critiques about the acts that we already have.
Measurement: Number of new Facebook and MySpace friends.
Measurement: Number of game and widget downloads.
Measurement: Number of video and photo submissions/tags.
Measurement: Number of users submitting ideas and feedback.
Any further suggestions, critiques or ideas?
I think this is great but I wonder if there can be some type of “buzz” metric that is reliable - pickup, referral, share, positive/neutral/negative coverage, etc? This sounds a lot like web metrics which are much more advanced (e.g. funnel/retention, etc) in Omniture and Fireclick than is described here.
I also think traffic should be weighted when measured. For example, we can strip out the bounces and then do deeper analysis on the traffic that actually did something - so that those numbers are not skewed by random glances.
I was looking at what Radian6 does - I think that is an interesting approach from a packaged perspective.
Getting your clients or even yourself to narrow your goals and focus is often the most difficult part. They all want to hit Digg’s frontpage, go viral on YouTube and get 100 comments per post. The thing I’ve noticed is the ones who succeed are the ones who have clear cut goals in mind. 100 new uniques/day that convert into 3-5 sales or 10 subscribers or whatever. Or trying to target a specific demographic/niche.
Narrowing your goal into something manageable is key to this whole plan.
[…] Chris Brogan wrote a very strong post today. He talked about the importance of having a Goal besides just having a strategy with no lead. Well he sure is true on that. Lets just dive in a little. […]
This is the first of your posts I’ve read since meeting on Twitter. Excellent stuff, Chris.
I always teach my students that writing down goals, strategies, concepts, and evaluation instantaneously transforms them from nebulous concepts echoing around the cranium to actionable, measurable and tangible steps. Productivity can increase infinitely (plus it frees up the mind to think of even more things.)
I enjoy your writing style & thoughts. Nicely done.
See you around Twitter.
@DrTodd
http://www.MapYourAptitude.com
I absolutely agree with you here. Measuring the results of social media is hard but crucial. There also has to be that goal, which is far more important than getting involved with SM because everyone else is.
Chris, I have comments for your (mission-critical) post.
But: they’re long long long (I’ve been working on a related project). When it’s ready, I’ll either post a trackback, drop comments here, or email to you. Just let me know if you’re up for an accountant-cum-nurse’s view on the matter.
Enjoy your weekend.
david lee king -
do you have any homepages in your county that offer internet access? Like coffee shops, McDonald’s, city networks, etc - ask them if you can put a link to your library site on the log-in page.
Also, ask yourself what will motivate people to go to your site? Children’s pages? Book reviews? what is there that’s unique?
Chris,
Thank you for your timely post. We are currently trying to make a comprehensive marketing and outreach plan for the new fiscal year, and breaking it out like this is a helpful reminder. Sometimes I get so caught up in the strategy and perceived goal that I don’t stop and articulate clear higher level goals and establish truly useful measurements. Doing this ahead of time is kind of an obvious thing, but sometimes it is easy to push to the side when you are in a hurry or in reactive mode.
Thank you for always providing me great food for thought! I look forward to your blog every day.
great post , I sent this to Truffle Media Networks staff.
This is one of those things (strategy, execute, measure, adjust) that makes sense on the surface but some how gets lost in the excitement of developing a project/marketing campaign. How many times have we seen “And we’ll make this cool web site and and we’ll capture people’s info and we’ll send them stuff constantly and they will thank us for the site” projects? Your posts help us remember! Thanks:)
Chris,
You really hit on something when you mentioned the first response you have to requests for ideas to increase blog traffic (“what’s the goal with the added traffic?”).
Something I’ve seen passed over time and time again in building social media strategies is what I call the “customer conversion engine.” We’re all fairly familiar with how social media turns strangers into friends, but not everybody is up to speed on how to turn friends into customers.
So “Why do you want more traffic?” turns you on to the important question of “What are you going to do when you actually succeed?”
This is really the final step in social media strategies, but also the most important. And for when you’re selling in your strategies to businesses, which as you mentioned are mostly curious about the ultimate effect on the bottom line, this is the key part of the strategy for getting client buy in.
Kudos for the smart thoughts!
Thanks, Connie for the cool idea - and thanks Chris for such a great thread! Lots of useful ideas to think about.
@Josh - you’ve got a great term there: “customer conversion engine.” That’s pretty much the missing piece.
Everyone - really great comments. Sorry I couldn’t dig in much to comment back. I’ve been pretty busy today, but I read every thought and idea. Feel free to look at each other’s ideas and comment. : )
@ Josh Klein and Chris
Here’s a goal every marketer needs to have:
Add value to your customers. Forget about ROI and leads and traffic generation and revenues and everything related to you until you’ve established how every step you make (blog posts, social media tools, newsletters, etc.) adds value to your customers. Value drives it all. Period.
If you don’t know what value your blog adds to your customers, then what are you doing? This is your first (and most important) goal.
So here are some goals (say for a blog):
-My customers will value my blog because they can kvetch about my bad service/product
-My customers value my blog because I get prompt responses to product recommendations
-My customers will value my blog because they can praise the good features of my service/product
-My customers value the interaction with other customers that my blog offers
-My customers value the fact that they can actively talk about a service they really are impressed with
So, all of your goals aught to follow from putting your customers value first and knowing what kind of value your bringing to your customers.
Value drives the customer conversion engine.
Good points, measurement and goals are two huge factors of any campaign. I have found that many times we come up with goals with no idea for what a market will bear. Say I want to blog about snowshoeing in Alaska. I pull the number 1000 people per day out of the air because I see others with the same goal. Are there 1000 people who will read that blog? I think market research should also be apart of the strategy as much as goals and measurement.
I forgot to put my personal goals.
-Goal 1 to learn more about topics by writing about them, so I can become a more competent marketer.
-Goal 2 to build street cred
-Goal 3 create something of value for others.
Sums it up
@Phil, that is great, thank you. You’re spot on with your laser focus on value, and from a strategic standpoint that is very much the fuel for your customer conversion engine.
The only additional point I’d like to add is that tactically, you need the gears, levers, and extended machinery to create an efficient engine. The fuel is the value, but I encourage everyone to be meticulous in their tactical execution by focusing every customer touch point into an experience that CONVEYS that value, and convinces the prospect that there is more value ahead.
Awesome!
[…] a piece describing 100 personal branding tactics that make use of social media and one presenting a goals and measurements aligning take on social media […]
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