Blog Potomac Speaker KD Paine
June 14th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine
The penultimate speaker at the unconference was KD Paine, who I had the pleasure of sitting next to at the dinner the previous evening and conversing about the topic of her presentation today – measurement and value.
The value of measurement is finding out what works and what doesn’t.
How do you know what social tool to use? Measurement. Find out what the impact is. You need to be absolutely clear abouut what the Return is before you can calculate your ROI. Know exactly what you’re trying to measure before you measure it.
- Figure out your goal(s)
- Figure out your audience
- What are the metrics that you want to report on?
- What are you benchmarking against?
- Don’t count eyeballs – measure engagement / leads. What is the value to you? Are you being positioned the way you want to be positioned? What is the conversation?
- So what? Analyze the information, explain why data shows what it shows. Then determine whether it’s working or not, and whether you should keep it going or not.
Q. How do you measure success?
A. Know the value of your customers / average transaction / members / ideas / etc.
Q. How long do you give before measuring impact?
A. Measure before you start (baseline). Most things have an immediate hit (most comments are in after 3 days), but she monitors for 14 just in case. Quarterly benchmarks don’t really tell you much, you really need to measure for another 3 months to compare. A better way is to use comparative measurement to see how you stand in your industry.
Q. How do you know when a blog needs to change or end?
A. Look at comments per post. 12-13 is average engagements, 35 is highly engaged. Also look at your traffic to see whether you have any traction. State Farm had a blog that had no comments, so they discontinued it. They relaunched a year later and instead of measuring comments, they instead measured employee morale and saw a nice increase
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