Gemma and I attended a workshop this morning hosted by Switched On Media’s Jye Smith on measuring social media outputs for campaigns.
It was a fantastic start to the morning to be in a room of fellow PR, marketing and digital consultants to talk about a tool we were clearly all passionate about and one that we want to share with our clients.
So I thought I would share some of the things we took away from the discussions (in no particular order).
- Set out the expectations of the social media campaign, both long and short term
- Set specific objectives for your online campaign that relate back to the overarching PR objectives
- Always ask, “Why?” and “What will it achieve?”
- Use your objectives to guide what you need to measure
- There are many tools to help quantify the results of social media campaigns
- When the objective is to drive traffic to a website, determine what the purpose of your website is? For instance, what page do you want people to visit the most?
- Listen. Understand emerging technology. Create compelling content
- Research, research, research.
There is certainly more that was discussed, so I invite those who attended to add some more points below.
Thanks again to Jye, Scot and Andy plus the other participants for an interesting and insightful morning.
@jo_drpr
Great post Jo! I’d echo all your sentiments…see you at the next one. This morning really put me in a different frame of mind about where to start from with social media in order to make it measurable.
Excellent summary Jo, thanks for putting together,I was also reminded of the fact that a clients understanding and advocacy of social media is usually dependent on them achieving a business result. Once they achieve a business result; get that first lead, that first customer, that first sale, via social media, they get the power of social media all of a sudden. Until then, it’s still a bit of a mystery for them. So the trick seems to be to help clients achieve something meaningful quickly, the education, measurement, ongoing strategy and retainer usually falls into place soon after.
It’s about applying the fundamentals of what we already do well, in our different disciplines, and using social media as a component of the overall strategy — which means incorporating some new measurements, for sure. I left today with some new questions to ask, a better understanding of some aspects of measurement, a few new ways to focus my research on behalf of my clients and an appreciation for the ultimate question … WHY? It was definitely invigorating to be in the room with a bunch of people who are all workin’ it and understanding one another. We worked our way through some really relevant discussions, together … it was good value for sure.
Nice post Jo, well done, and thanks SOM.
Hi Jo,
It was a great discussion and look forward to the next one.
I wanted to add and emphasise the importance of getting specific, measurable and time based objectives. It’s worthless measuring anything if you don’t have clear objectives to measure against.
Obviously, being agency side we are expected to lead these conversations and use our experience to challenge our clients to ensure their goals are realistic and achievable.
Have a great weekend.