Social Media Measurement

It’s been a busy week in the world of social media measurement, or social analytics, as I like to call it.

Anna O’Brien, Marketing Science analyst extraordinaire, wrote a very good post on the topic. Her primary point, enough with the phony people, is polarizing and necessary. The secondary point: social monitoring is not social measuring is also apt and important.

My interests like in the measurement side: content analytics and metric analytics. There’s a lot of utility there.

A few months ago Joseph Carrabis did a very interesting sentiment analysis on Zappos’ twitter stream. “Tone optimization” will no doubt end up being a major offering sooner rather than later. Let me explain.

Optimizing a web campaign can be very hard. It’s hard because our institutions make it hard. Social media marketing strategy can be built in such a way that it can be optimized. Every response can be improved. “Learning” is possible in an accelerated way.

To that end, tone is an important variable. It’s a vital variable in web copy just as it is in social media marketing. Language matters. (I’ve been reading “Language and Human Behavior” – sometimes the paragraphs drip with frustration). Sometimes what you say isn’t nearly as important as how you say it.

Knowing how many people are saying ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ things is one thing – but what about what your staff is putting out there. What’s the tone? What’s the effect? How can be it changed to improve the outcome and hit your goal?

This is the promise of social media measurement.

In sum, it’s been a busy week for social media measurement.