Tracking 2.0
Social media is all about engagement, but measuring it for marketing purposes is still a work in progress.
Publishers everywhere have been turning to social media to pull their readers further into the brand experience, and extend their brands to where customers like to congregate. However, fitting the analytics behind social media interaction into the marketing channel is still, in many cases, being figured out. In the meantime, audience developers are closely following all the quantitative elements they can as they syndicate their brands and content into every corner of the social networking world.
“We define success right now around a community model, rather than a social media model,” said Stephen Wellman, director of community and content at Ziff Davis Enterprise, during a panel discussion at the 2009 Audience Development show in June. “Social media, in my mind, is a hook to the audience, but it’s useless unless you have things for them to do. We’re defining that success metric by engagement: How long people are staying on the Web sites, are they commenting on articles, are they sharing the articles and blog posts, are they signing up for new products like e-seminars and newsletters?”
Ultimately, added Wellman, the success metric will shift away from pageviews to metrics based on the number of visitors and how long they spend on a site. “We’re going to see engagement as a pure traffic metric eclipse those [pageview] numbers as well.”
Leverage Personality
Brendan Monaghan, director of business development at The Slate Group, which publishes online magazine Slate.com, among other brands, noted during the same panel that customers like to follow a particular writer, not just content itself. “On the b-to-c side, we have a lot of readers that follow our writers and they want that engagement to not be around a specific piece of content, but around a writer.”
As an example, Monaghan says that John Dickerson, Slate.com’s primary political writer, has 400,000 followers on Twitter. And Dickerson doesn’t just tweet links to his stories. “People are passionate about what he does and he engages with them directly by tweeting, whether he’s at a White House event or tweeting his own blog posts. People are engaging with him personally, and that is something from a b-to-c perspective that is important.”
It’s those personal touches that draw in and serialize the engagement. “Engagement is an organic process,” says Wellman. “People who are best at using social media to attract followers are honest and share stuff they’re interested in. It will include content that’s outside your ecosystem—stuff that you’re not publishing in your own properties—which can make old-school publishers uncomfortable, but that’s the way the game is played.”
In the meantime, Wellman and his team are following along, watching how users interact—with an eyen on how behavior metrics can eventually be acted on. “You can use realtime conversational search on Twitter—Search.Twitter.com— to follow certain keywords. We follow how often we’re retweeted on news items or how often our editors are followed or how often important keywords in our industry are mentioned. Now, what do we do with those [metrics]? I don’t know, the book is open on that. We’re still trying to figure out how that fits into the direct marketing funnel.”
Keep Communication Open
At the end of the day, cautions Wellman, analytics are great, but make sure communication between audience developers and site editors is a two-way street. “In the online universe, the content is the chief marketing vehicle to acquire subscribers. So the editors should be much more involved in the initiatives you’re using to get new audience members to the site. It’s the content that’s going to bring subscribers in, grow the database, the newsletters and your page views. If you’re not getting that intelligence feedback [between editors and audience developers] you’re not going to be successful at social media or any other online initiative.”
The Social Media Swiss Army Knife
Publishers are discovering the benefits of marketing content through Twitter, but Matt Donnelly, community relationship manager at UBM’s ChannelWeb Connect, uses the service as a live event tool. “Twitter is a great Swiss army knife. We use it for events as well, as a communication backchannel. We use it to keep attendees updated—reminders are sent to mobile phones or laptops about an upcoming keynote; links to venue maps or the agenda on the show Web site. It’s also a good way for attendees to communicate with each other. It personalizes the event.”
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