Listen, implement & measure to keep up with your users’ needs

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, metrics specialists, educators.

Guest post by Ritu Sharma
Social Media for Nonprofits

Like many of the nonprofits Social Media for Nonprofits works with, we were excited by the recent release of Beth’s new book, Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: Using Data to Change the World.

In line with the book’s focus on turning data into knowledge through powerful, insightful measurement and analytics of social media efforts, we wanted to share three simple tips and resources that nonprofits can put to work.

All of these platforms have been profiled at our recent Social Media for Nonprofits conferences, which is about to produce its final U..S program of the year in Seattle on Monday, before we head to New Delhi in December, and then back to New York City, Silicon Valley, Vancouver, plus most other major U.S. markets in 2013.

And now, for those tips and tools:

Get to know your audience

1Want to know what makes your online audience tick? Then check out Simply Measured. In particular, their free reports give you your social audience’s pulse on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, and other platforms. There’s a gold mine of intelligence presented in their 8-10 insightful, colorful analysis tools. Learn who your followers are, what issues they care about, which posts are firing up your base, and what types of content are gaining steam and going viral.

Make your website shine

2How can you make your web footprint work for you and complement your social strategy? Nonprofits get free access to Google Analytics, a robust tool that tracks what turns your audience on or off when they land on your site. This tool highlights the behaviors that are most important to understand, including where your audience came from, what content they looked at, how long they stuck around, where you lost them, and to what extent your readers engaged with your content.

Monitor social conversations

3Discover a social treasure of other cause-driven folks like you connecting with like-minded professionals, sharing content, and tracking followers by analyzing your nonprofit’s social media presence. Keep an eye on all your social conversations, wherever they take place, with Sprout Social (think HootSuite on steroids).

Nonprofits can save 50 percent on this low-cost tool, which gives you the ability to engage with your base, strategically search for better followers, identify posts that get superb traction, and of courser, schedule your posts in advance. Note: Pre-scheduling posts should only be used for Twitter and LinkedIn posts, but Facebook de-prioritizes posts scheduled via third party platforms, so that’s a no-no. Thankfully, you can now pre-schedule posts on Facebook directly.

We hope you decide to take advantage of these powerful tools, and that you join us at any of the upcoming Social Media for Nonprofits conferences around the world for more insights, tips, and tools. Come see great speakers like everyone’s favorite, Beth Kanter, plus Guy Kawasaki and senior leaders from leading social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, plus nonprofit executives from National Geographic, American Red Cross, Greenpeace, Kiva.org, Story of Stuff, DonorsChoose, and charity:water. To ensure broad accessibility, we keep conference registration fees down to about $100, including breakfast, lunch, and access to the full-day program. Scholarships are available for smaller nonprofits.

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Where to find stats, metrics & analytics for you & your brand

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, businesses, brands, bloggers, social media managers, individuals.

This is the part of our ongoing series on how organizations can get the most out of Twitter. Please check back weekly for the next installment. Also see:

• 8 nonprofit Twitter superstars
• 12-step guide on how to live-tweet an event
• 24 best practices for nonprofits using Twitter

By Kyria Abrahams
Socialbrite staff

After you’ve used Twitter for a time, you’ll want to measure your influence on Twitter as well as you’re performing from month to month. Unless you want to hire someone to spend the day counting and analyzing your retweets, take a look at the free tools below (some may have paid premium versions) and put them to use on behalf of your nonprofit, social enterprise, business — or your own brand.

Klout: Measure influence and style

Klout is a visual, logical way to quickly see the main thing most organizations want to know about Twitter: where you stand against the competition. The application’s initial strength is the ease with which you can compare yourself to your peers. After using Klout for about a month, however, the information becomes more advanced, if not just downright complimentary. My “Klout Style” page, for example, offers sleek flattery such as: “You don’t just share news, you create the news” and “When you speak, people listen.” Thanks, Klout! How’s my tie look?

Rating: ★ ★ ★

PeerIndex: Assess your online social capital

Where Klout was accessible and easy to decipher, I found PeerIndex a bit baffling. PeerIndex separates itself by measuring how your tweets “resonate” with others. They include ranking on several important-sounding topics, such as “authority,” “activity” and “realness.” Klout said I was influential, but PeerIndex seems to think my influence is limited. After reading through the Scores and Ranking page in the hopes of defining these terms, I came away still mystified about how the topics work and what they mean. On the plus side, if you use this tool at work, you can probably sound impressive in an office meeting by reporting to your boss that the Twitter project is highly authoritative. It might be a strong tool, but when all is said and done, I didn’t dig too deep into the site. However, it has a nice comparison graph that allows you to add and remove other Twitter users.

Rating: ★ ★

Twitalyzer: A subscription-model tool

Twitalyzer operates mainly on a subscription model, but gives away some basic features for free. I’m not in a position to pay $99/month to track my competition or get daily email alerts, so I can’t speak about its full range of offerings. I do feel comfortable saying it may not worth $99/month to spy on Cogsley Cogs’ Twitter statistics and your time would be better spent working on your own page. With a free account, I was able to log in and immediately see my relative percentile (only as ranked among other Twitalyzer users, though) and a map that informed me that most of my views come from New Jersey. It also told me what my Klout and PeerIndex ratings were. This seems like a tool better suited to analyzing your competition than to analyzing yourself.

Rating: ★ ★

TweetStats: Graph your stats!

Tweetstats remains true to its name, as it compiles a bar graph for quick viewing of your monthly stats. Easily see who you @replied to, whom you retweet and what time of day you tweet the most. A useful, basic tool that will offer a helpful overview for any Twitter campaign your nonprofit or business undertakes.

Rating: ★ ★ ★

Crowdbooster: Schedule and analyze

Of all the applications I used, Crowdbooster was my personal favorite. In addition to analyzing your influence and impressions, they also set themselves apart with useful features like the ability to schedule a tweet at the time where it will reach the most amount of followers. They provide actionable recommendations on influential users, offering the option to follow them back from inside their application. I found their charts clear and precise, and their analysis was directly applicable to my Twitter page.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

Tweet Grader: Score your profile

Part of a suite of free online marketing tools powered by HubSpot, Tweet Grader is a straightforward tool that measures the power of your Twitter profile. Type in your Twitter handle and Tweet Grader generates a score out of 100 for your overall Twitter profile. You can also use it to find out the scores of other Twitter users and then compare those to your own. In calculating your score, Tweet Grader’s algorithm takes into account the following factors: number and power of followers, follower-to-following ratio, update frequency and most recent, as well as engagement. The site is also handy for seeing top lists, generated by Twitter Grader based on its scoring system. Use it to locate the “Twitter elite,” i.e. Top Users, Top Brands and even Top Women on Twitter.

Rating ★ ★

Tweet Reach: Insight into your tweets

Ever wondered about the value of a tweet? With Tweet Reach, you can get analytics that measure the impact of social media conversations. You can search based on a URL, Twitter name, phrase or hashtag. Tweet Reach then analyzes all the tweets that match your search and generates a report that includes exposure data on those tweets. Extremely useful if your organization uses a specific hashtag often and you want to be able to see how far-reaching the conversation is. The downside is that the free service generates a very basic report, which tells you stats only for the most recent 50 tweets for your search term. For a more detailed report, you can pony up $20 and go into the nitty gritty about your tweets.

Rating: ★ ★ ★

Twitter articles on Socialbrite

• 24 best practices for nonprofits using Twitter

• 8 nonprofit Twitter superstars

• 12-step guide on how to live-tweet an event

• 40 hashtags for social good

• 12 great nonprofits & causes to follow on Twitter

• Build a fan base: How to get more followers on Twitter

• Go viral: 13 ways to get your blog posts retweeted

• Twitter tutorials: Twitter Lists, hashtags, Twitter stats & more

The post 7 top tools to measure performance & influence on Twitter appeared first on Socialbrite.

Guest post by Beth Kanter
bethkanter.org

Last week public relations and measurement professionals met in Lisbon, Portugal, for a summit hosted by the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communications. Of interest was an workshop that was designed to begin setting the standards in social media measurement co-facilitated by KD Paine, an expert in communications and social media measurement.

The workshop shared a landscape analysis of what’s already out there from the various industries to build a clear understanding of what’s in place and what isn’t in terms of valid metrics around social media measurement.

Download the 18-page document (PDF) here.

The workshop built on the Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles (PDF) that were identified at last year’s summit. These are more philosophical but represent good practice for a measurement approach to accompany your social media strategy.

Applying a valid measurement approach for nonprofits

I took a stab at translating them to a nonprofit context:

1Set SMART objectives and identify a measurement strategy at the start of your campaign or program. Social media measurement should take a holistic approach including both traditional and social media and look at changes in awareness among key audiences, attitude, action and behavior change that impacts business results.

2Measure the effect on outcomes, don’t measure outputs. Measure your results, not just numbers. A typical output measure might be the number of visitors to a website or participants in a program. What should be measured are shifts in awareness, comprehension, attitude and behavior related to donations, purchase, branding, reputation, public policy, employee engagement and other shifts in audience beliefs or behaviors related to SMART objectives.

3Measure the effect on business results where possible. The confusion around whether or not you can measure social media has moved from “you can’t measure social media” to figuring out what to measure.

4Media measurement requires quantity and quality. This principle is about measuring both quantative and qualitative information. It’s more than just impressions — you should also look at measuring tone, relevance, message delivery and sentiment.

5Beware bogus metrics. AVE stands for “Advertising Value Equivalents” or as KD Paine likes to call it “Assessment By Voodoo Economics.” This is using bogus social media metrics to translate into some value. Geoff Livingston has a good post about the problems with this – using influence as the metric.

6Social media can and should be measured. Incorporate the discipline of measurement into your approach to go beyond just measuring “coverage” but also to measure conversation and communities. We’ve come a long way since the early days of social media in terms of measurement practice.

7Transparency and replicability are paramount to sound measurement. Measurement methods need to be shared as well as how specific metrics are calculated.

Putting principles into action: A valid metrics matrix

Click for larger image.

The Valid Metrics Framework was developed by AMEC to serve as a framework to identify possible metrics for measuring a communications program. These are simply guidelines to help think through what to measure – or what metrics will help your organization demonstrate progress toward an objective.

The Valid Metrics Framework looks at communications in three phases with each consisting of specific metrics.

1. The messages or story is created and shared: Metrics are related to the process of producing or sharing the desired message or story.
2. The story is shared via an intermediary – journalists, bloggers, or influencers, with metrics reflecting the sharing of the message with the target audience.
3. The story is consumed by the target audience that leads to action and desired outcome: Metrics showing that the target audience has received the message and been inspired to take action.

The other part of the matrix includes a continuum based on the “marketing funnel” — or, for nonprofits, the “ladder of engagement” — going from awareness to understanding, consideration, support and action. (See image at very top.)

The document includes examples from different industries, including nonprofit organizations and for advocacy campaigns.

How would your nonprofit use this matrix to help measure and guide strategy formation? How would you adapt the matrix or resulting measurement strategy to fit your organization’s capacity?

This article originally appeared at bethkanter.org and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

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Guest post by Ryann Miller
frogloop

Last week I attended the Women Who Tech TeleSummit. One of the most anticipated sessions was the session with blogger Beth Kanter and Lauren Varga of Radian6 and moderated by Roz Lemieux of Fission Strategy.

I’ve long admired and respected Beth, and I’m a fan of Radian6, a social media monitoring service. The session covered a lot of ground for a fairly contained topic and I was impressed with the depth and breadth of the presentation. Beth and Lauren discussed both strategy and tools, tips and metrics, leaving little ground uncovered. The focus was around the return on investment: how to think of the value of social media, the things you need before starting any campaign, and how to measure, analyze and sell campaigns. Here’s a recap:

Part I: A guide for your social media adventure

Let’s say you want to get started using social media. Where? How? While this session wasn’t a primer, Beth’s four ‘I’s, plus the discussion on objectives and SMART analysis, are a fantastic starting point.

The philosophy and definition of ROI

Beth’s four ‘I’ terms are a contextual lens through which to look at social media ROI. She said she takes a broader definition of ROI, to include:

1. Return on Insight: this is about harvesting intelligence about what works and what doesn’t, to apply to the future. Listening, learning and adapting – sometimes called an iterative process – means that you take a longer-term view of the project, that sometimes a culture change within your organization is necessary to make room for reflection, and that you’ll find success and know what it is when you find it. If you find that tweeting about the hard-hitting emotional stuff seems to get the biggest reaction every time, apply this to remaining communications for this medium even if it means going back and changing agreed-upon communication pieces. Beyond that, remember it for future campaigns.
 
2. Return on Interaction: it’s about engagement and relationship building with your audience. The goal is to set people on the ladder of engagement to become donors/members/lovers of your cause. But before you get there, how are they engaging with you? What are they saying? How do they treat your brand? This has to be monitored in order to be evaluated.
 
3. Return on Investment: investment is about value, and measuring the relationship between what you’ve done and what it costs. Some tangible indicators are: fundraised dollars, new activists or email list growth, new volunteers,
 
4. Return on Impact: this is about our big goal – to effect social change. Sometimes impact is different or more than just about investment. If you can use Twitter to stop a company from doing something, or vote for something, while that may be hard to quantify, there is a return on impact.

These four ‘I’s are valuable as a starting point for any organization looking to dive into social media in a concerted way. I’d recommend a discussion around these four ‘I’s by any team about to start a social media campaign, because it’ll help you to be thoughtful and reflective, and therefore more strategic, as you get started and get comfortable with social media metrics and measurement. I think Beth’s underlying point here is: Do this thoughtfully and with goals and guidelines.

Start at the beginning: Define objectives that you can measure

To follow up on the idea of what you need before getting started, one of the main points by both Lauren and Beth was to have your objectives mapped out prior to any campaign or project. Beth discussed using a SMART Analysis: all objectives must be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and timed. if you could only take away one point from this presentation, that should be it. With these objectives determined, you’re as prepared as you can be going in, and you’ll have tangible metrics to do proper analysis on your way out. Only after you have your objectives should you start looking at the technology itself.

Part 2: What are you seeing and why does it matter?

What to measure, besides dollars raised: With that theoretical primer under our belts, it’s time to talk measurement. Lauren discussed the usual suspects regarding measurement metrics: volume, engagement, sentiment, share of voice and share of conversation. (Quick distinction here from me, not Beth or Lauren: share of voice refers to your brand mentions (in blog posts, tweets, videos, etc.) compared to your competitors within your issue or sector, while share of conversation refers to the degree to which your organization is associated with the issue/problem that you want to fix/resolve/improve).

What you measure has be decided in part by the objectives and goals you have. Want to grow your non-donor file? Measure the quantity of new supporters, based on what engagement in what time frame, and what issue they came in on. Want to raise money? You might then be less concerned with the quantity of new names and more focused on the quality. Have they taken any actions sent to them, such as sending to a friend, signing a petition? Sentiment might be very important if you’re trying to build loyalty and engagement, but not if you’re trying to stop a bill from being passed.

I think share of voice is a critical metric and organizations should consider measuring SOV based on critical keywords outside of any specific campaign. In this age of hyper-competition, a savvy organization is one that knows where its brand reputation stands for any given month. The value is that it’s the outside world telling you who you’re up against and by how much, not what you think, and not market research. Who owns the dialogue? How are you distinguishing yourself and claiming ownership of the issue? How are your competitors drawing attention? None of that is intrinsically obvious without ongoing measurement of your share of voice within your sector or issue area.

Do’s and don’ts of social media ROI

Last, a solid collection of do’s and don’t-do’s when assessing social media ROI:

• Track the essential keywords regarding both your organization and your campaign.
• Don’t do drive-by analysis, take some time
• When identifying benefits, remember that some will be quantitative while others while be qualitative. For example, increased loyalty, sentiment and engagement are valuable benefits.
• Link metrics back to results and avoid “metrics as therapy” – the condition whereby you’re gratified simply because you have new followers and they seem to like you.
• “Spreadsheet aerobics”: only collect data that works for you, that makes sense, and that you make actionable. Keep spreadsheets thin and trim. You should spend less time on the spreadsheet than the project itself.
• Be low risk, be simple, don’t overdesign any test or campaign.
• Think about what results you want to communicate: Be concise, show the overall value and how you measured that, not every minute detail and metric. Don’t forget this is both storytelling and a business case.
• Better that you start with a small and successful test, rather than a large and unsuccessful campaign.

Useful links

• http://socialmedia-listening.wikispaces.com/Tools

• http://www.bethkanter.org/wwt-ro/

• http://www.kdpaine.com/ (the metrics guru)

• http://www.smartchart.org/

I took away a lot from this session, from the theoretical to the practical, from the small to the very large. While the parts seemed somewhat disconnected, Beth and Lauren know their material inside and out and did a great job of distilling everything.

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