Katy will start of be setting out the ROI structure, asking: what are your goals? What do you want to achieve? By how much and, crucially, by when? She will explain the many different forms of “value”: such as cost savings, trust, the financial value of an advocate, the lifetime value of a maven etc. and set out how you might benchmark these values – and even test them before you start your campaign.

Next, she will look at the “consumer journey”, explaining how relationships with customers can develop over time, how their journeys fracture and become more complex, and how this effects measurement.  She will look at critical success factors, asking: how will you know if your campaign is working?  What are the milestones? And how will you separate the influence of other activities from this one?

It’s obviously crucially important to identify what you are measuring right from the start of your campaign. Katy will work through this process, setting out a framework for defining KPI, asking what the pitfalls of trying to measure some KPI’s are (including how sentiment is not a good measure of advocacy) and exploring other examples of “hard to measure” benefits, such as the value of ratings and reviews, product seeding and community involvement.

In the penultimate session of the workshop, Katy will focus on evaluation, including how to benchmark and how to set out detailed metrics analysis, plus the absolute need for frequent optimising and A/B testing. She will also explain the need for marketing mix modelling and econometrics as an evaluation and decision support tool – using Adidas as a case study.

Finally, Katy will do a live experiment. Using volunteers from the audience she will work through their requirements, producing a framework that will enable them to measure the results of their social media activities. If you’re coming to the workshop – I would strongly advise volunteering for this part of the session, it could save you an awful lot of time and money.

Luke Brynley-Jones talks with Philip Hofmeyr at Social Media Measurement & Monitoring (photo: Benjamin Ellis)

So who’s making the money in social media measurement and monitoring? I was on a panel asked this question at the Measurement & Monitoring Meetup on Friday. It’s essentially another take on the ROI of social media monitoring question, but with the focus widened to include suppliers and consultants, and at first sight it’s a rather annoying question. Having established at the Chinwag event on Tuesday that social media isn’t (necessarily) all about financial ROI, to be asked where the money is in relation to social media monitoring tools seems regressive.

Yet it’s actually a burning issue for many of the suppliers. Having tried and tested many of the leading services over the last few months (Sysomos, Synthesio, Radian6, Brandwatch among others), I have a new-found respect for the task these guys have taken on. Not only are they sifting through millions of new conversations every day, they are having to linguistically analyse these conversations and then produce results according to often very complex individual algorithms entered by their customers. This isn’t rocket science, but it requires rocket fuel of a variety in it’s processing power. That costs money so they need to charge their users for their services, and most of them do.

But are they making money? Granted, there’s a gold-rush going on, with companies desperate to know and understand what’s being said about them online. But, with some exceptions, social media is not yet accepted wisdom in many boardrooms and budgets in no way match the enthusiasm of individuals in forward-thinking PR and marketing teams. Even the sponsors of highly successful campaigns (such as the Meerkat) have not seen the need to invest in social media monitoring tools.

We’re just not there yet in terms of credibility and investment. The market is too young, too fragmented and too volatile for anyone to be making a fortune out of monitoring yet. As I said in the final Panel session at the event on Friday, I think we need to see some clear market leaders emerging, with easily comparable pricing and feature lists, before customers will have the confidence to invest freely in this exciting new marketplace. And of course, the shadow of a free dinner around the corner (aka Google Social Analytics) is likely to cause some companies to delay their purchasing decisions.

I guess that leaves the Consultants. I’d love to say that in times of uncertainty, it’s the consultants who make all the money, but in truth it isn’t. Consultants are at the bottom of the food chain in this ecosystem. First the brands need to be making money, enough money to feel confident enough to invest in something new. Then the monitoring companies need to be making money, enough money to be a contender. Then, someone has to decide that this is quite a complex field and it might help to bring in a real expert. I can tell you, that doesn’t happen all that often!

On that note – Marshall Sponder and Nathan Gilliatt, two of the best social media monitoring consultants around, will be in the UK at the end of March 2010. Contact us if you’d like to book an appointment with either of them.