Creating and Monitoring Your Organization's Social Barometer

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What metric is important to your business? How do you measure the success of a campaign or product? Does your social media analytics strategy monitor those indicators across multiple channels? In order for social media programs and their subsequent measurement to gain further support in the enterprise, they have to be tied to key business metrics. Tracking and reporting on 'Likes' and mentions does not give your organization enough solid data to know if your business is moving the needle in the right direction.

Creating a Social Barometer

One recommendation we give to clients is to ask them to define what are the critical behaviors or actions you want consumers or viewers to take. In retail, it might be identifying those:
  • consumers expressing an intention to buy or buying
  • consumers providing an opinion on a product or discount program
  • consumers describing a problem
For broadcast TV, it might be monitoring those:
  • viewers expressing an intention to watch or who are viewing
  • viewers expressing loyalty to a program or character or who have said "this is my favorite" show
The important point to remember is that these consumer actions can be translated into a social barometer that can be monitored, tracked and tied to other metrics, like Nielsen ratings or sales data for richer and more predictive analysis.

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The image above comprises a set of  indicators within a competitive landscape. This example configuration enables an organization to not only track key metrics, like:
  • Viewing Intent
  • Watching
  • Affinity
  • Favorite
but also how a show is performing in those key areas against other broadcasts.This type of information translates a social media analytics effort from a passive noting of mentions and volume to one of actionable insights that can inform advertising or promotion sales, program scheduling and conversation drivers.

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An important qualifier for each of these metrics is the actual underlying conversation. Having access to confirm consumer intentions not only allows for the validation of the breakdown but can provide additional insights into the demographics of this particular audience segmentation.

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The indicators that comprise your social barometer will be as unique as your business. Honing in on those expressions of intent or behavior that can be tied and validated using other business metrics will ensure that you are deriving actionable insights from your monitoring. Like to see a social barometer in action, check out our new video: