Measuring social: Even Q couldn't do it.

I'm sure you've seen this video from Coke Zero. It's brilliant.

Best example of a marketing viral I've seen in ages and I'm sure the Coke Zero social marketing team are giving themselves well deserved pats on the back.

This one's going to turn up in every "how to do social" slide deck that gets produced in the next 12 months. It's a rare example of a social campaign where nobody's going to argue with the value. Any marketer would be proud to have it on his CV.

But what if finance got awkward?

What if they insisted you'd never be allowed to pull a stunt like this again, unless you could prove it sold some bottles of Cola?

Well then you'd have a problem.

I've posted before that for a variety of reasons you've got virtually no chance of linking social media activity to sales. Actually, let's rephrase that. There are hundreds of ways to imply a link, but it's virtually impossible to prove a link, mostly because it's hard to get good audience data on who saw the viral and when they saw it, plus any positive effects it has on sales are likely to build up slowly, so looking for an immediate spike won't work.

We've all seen loads of 'how to measure the ROI of social' articles, which then spend five hundred words avoiding the question, but for once, I'd like to hit that question head on. First of all, for ROI in terms of additional sales, forget it. Even if you've got sophisticated econometric models in place you'll be lucky to pick up the effect. So here's what I'd do.

Your answer is going to need a £ figure in it, because you're talking to finance. Loads of Facebook shares and positive Twitter sentiment isn't going to cut it.

That YouTube video's got 3.8m views, so line up your social campaign vs. the alternatives. How much would it cost to run a TV advertising spot that achieved 3.8m impacts?

Actually, not that much. In the UK, take an average adult cost per thousand impacts on TV of £5 (ish) and you're looking at an equivalent value of... £19,000.

Damn, that's not very impressive. Probably not enough.

Say you can show that the audience for the YouTube vid is a bit better than a blanket "adults" target. That it's younger and would be harder to reach with TV. That wouldn't be difficult; if nothing else, you could show that YouTube users in general are younger and so your viral audience probably is too.

Now you might be able to justify a cost per thousand of around £50, rather than £5 because hitting younger viewers with TV spots is expensive. Your equivalent media value is £190,000. Better.

But hang on, that video is two minutes long, not the standard 30" TV spot. Four times the spot length, gets us to a value of £760,000.

That's more like it.

It's also more good evidence for why you'll struggle to measure a social media effect on sales. A global TV campaign for Coke with a budget of £760,000? Don't make me laugh. It's a drop in the ocean.

Once you've got a nice solid financial number, you can layer on some softer metrics, always referring back to  what it would have cost you to expose that audience in a different way. Did you gain Facebook followers? Great. They're valuable because you can talk to them again, rather than spending money somewhere else.

Shares on Twitter? Careful, those people are already in the YouTube plays number.

New followers on Twitter? Lovely, just like the Facebook ones, they have a value because now you can show them more advertising messages.

The last step you might want to try is that direct link to sales. You won't be able to prove it (I might have mentioned that) but you can imply it. If there's a general ROI to TV circulating in the business then you've just put social in the same space as that media, so you can potentially borrow it. How many sales would a TV campaign of that value have generated?

You might also be tempted to make the case that somehow Facebook advertising messages, or YouTube video views are 'better' than TV spots - that they're more engaging and with higher impact - but be very, very careful. You're doing this exercise for finance and they're almost certainly starting from the viewpoint that an ad is an ad, no matter where it's shown. Do you have rock solid evidence that it's better (ROI better) to talk to people on a social network than on TV? I don't. In fact I have the opposite, because you're more likely to be talking to existing customers.

Do what you can with the real financial metrics and accept that sometimes, your equivalent ROI number isn't going to look very impressive. After all, we've just proved that the best viral we've seen this year is probably worth less than running £1m worth of the same creative on TV.

A clash of broadcasting worlds

Did you watch Felix Baumgartner's record breaking jump yesterday? It was amazing.

Watching live on the Red Bull branded wesite at www.redbullstratos.com, I thought we could be seeing a new era in live broadcasting. After all, if you own the content, then why get somebody else to broadcast it for you? Run your own station, for as long as you need it, on the web.

Why would Neil Armstrong's moon landing be broadcast on TV in an era of live streaming?

There is a very good reason.

Red Bull's stream (via YouTube) attracted an audience of eight million. That would be very impressive if it was a UK audience, but it isn't. It's a global audience.

Eight million globally is, frankly, a bit crap. It's a YouTube record, but that's not the point. ITV were showing an hour long Coronation Street special at the same time as Felix was hoping he'd packed his 'chute properly and that did 6.25m, just in the UK.

So why do you want a regular TV broadcaster for your content? Simple. Audience reach. It's the same reason advertisers want TV ads, even if they've truly bought into social media.

I'm assuming one of two things happened with Red Bull Stratos. Either Google bunged Red Bull some fairly serious cash for the exclusive rights to Live stream via YouTube, or regular broadcasters just weren't interested, because they couldn't be given a predictable prime-time slot when the jump would take place. "Sometime in the next week if the weather's ok" doesn't really work for an ITV scheduler.

In one (fabulous) event, we've got the best and worst of new and old media. Only old media could have got that footage in front of its true potential audience. But TV is too inflexible to make the scheduling work for an event as unpredictable as the Stratos project.

In the UK at least, it's a shame we didn't have a dedicated digital TV channel that could be activated on short notice and then trailed on a major network. Press the red button to watch a nutter jump from space. The technology is there and it worked really well during the olympics. For a moon landing type event (Mars landing?) in 2012, I'm betting that's what would happen.

Unfortunately, the broadcaster with that capability is the BBC. With Red Bull logos everywhere? Never going to happen.

We're not quite living in the future yet. If you missed the footage yesterday because you didn't have one eye on Twitter, then here's the Austrian with the big cahones in all his high altitude parachutey glory. Enjoy.

Marketing's belief in social: Out of step?

A survey has just dropped across my desk from Pulse Point Group and The Economist Intelligence Unit, that looks at how effective social media is perceived to be among 329 respondents from US and Canadian companies.

Overall, results point to a strong faith in social. I say faith, because unfortunately there's not much evidence in the survey that anybody can prove their belief that social is tremendously effective.

These respondents have a faith so strong, that to be honest, I'm suspicious of a self selecting panel of respondents; people who believe strongly in social are just the sort of people to volunteer themselves for the survey...

One chart jumped out as badly in need of turning the conclusion around and seeing how it looks with an opposite interpretation.

This chart illustrates the leading current, and expected future advocates of social, by department. It's led by marketing. No surprises there.

C-Suite is senior management for us Brits by the way.

The title of that chart puts a very strong interpretation on the data. HR, Operations and Finance are miles behind marketing in being advocates for social and the headline poses the question,

"Is there a problem with Finance and HR?"

I'm going to look at it the other way.

"Is it a problem, that marketing is so far ahead of the rest of the company in its belief in social effectiveness?"

Asking if there's a problem with HR and Finance implies that Marketing is correct and that the other departments just haven't caught up yet.

Look at it this way.

Marketing's belief in social is more than twice as strong as senior management's belief.

Marketing's belief in social is ten times stronger, than the belief of those whose job it is to understand how much money the company makes and where that money comes from.

At the very least, if marketing are right about social, then they've dramatically failed to persuade finance that they're right.

The risks of social media

We hear a lot of talk about the benefits of a social media presence, but we speak less often about the downside. However, like every marketing activity, social has the potential to sell a product, or to put across a message and it also has an intrinsic risk.

The risk on a traditional TV campaign is different to social. Unless a brand is being deliberately controversial, it's unlikely that you'll badly offend anybody with your thirty seconds of exposure and so the risk is in the budget that you commit to TV. You spend millions buying airtime and give up another slice of your budget to film the ad and you risk that it doesn't work; that it doesn't prompt people to go out and actually buy the product. We tend to think that this risk is pretty low and as long as your ad reaches some minimum quality, it will at least work a little, just by getting the brand name in front of people.

So what about social media risk? You don't usually commit such large marketing budgets to social and so the risk seems low. You might as well have a social presence - what is there to lose?

On a risk vs. reward basis, there's potentially a great deal to lose.

Ed Miliband's having a bad afternoon on Twitter. Somebody (and a staffer in his office seems to be taking the blame rather than the man himself) tweeted this is response to the death of Bob Holness today.

An odd typo, especially as it follows hot on the heels of Labour MP Diane Abbott (@HackneyAbbott) tweeting that "white people love playing divide and rule" and starting a racism row.

So, a substantial down-side risk of social media. The risk is heightened by the lack of oversight and care in a tweet, compared to a traditional ad that comes with an invoice attached. There's no way Diane Abbott's comment would have made it into an election leaflet to her constituency for example - or you'd certainly hope not - as a proof-reader would pick up on it and she'd choose her words much more carefully.

In the agency recently, we've been revamping our approach to social and one of the key questions for me is should you do social at all?. The answer is not always a simple yes. If you're not going invest serious effort, or are going to put junior staff in charge of the accounts, then social media is mostly a potential risk, rather than a potential benefit.

That risk is tough to assess and is similar to what disaster planners call a "high impact, low probability event".

The exec you put in charge of the Twitter account probably won't screw up and post something that could be construed as racist. Greenpeace probably won't decide that you're a corporate bad guy and start bombarding your Facebook page. Probably nobody will tell a customer with a legitimate complaint that they're a pain in the neck. Low probability.

But if they do, they'll be doing it in public... High impact.

Taking risks is fine if there's a potential benefit that outweighs the risk, which brings us back to Ed Miliband. I can't understand why he has a Twitter presence at all. @Ed_Miliband tweets once every couple of days, giving the bland Labour Party line on usually fairly dull topics. For me, there is no way that the @Ed_Miliband account can be doing a great deal of good for Miliband or for Labour. It's just there.

Which means it just sits there, generating minimal benefits and waiting for something to go wrong, like it has today. The account it a risk and that's all it is.

If your social presence is a "me too", or a vanity project, or in the hands of a junior exec because what could possibly go wrong? Then it might be time to think about whether you should have one at all. Maybe the only thing it's doing is sitting there, quietly, until the low probability event happens that makes you wish it could just go back to being ignored.

Social media as a source is a dangerous game for newspapers

Many commentators have described the conditions currently facing the UK newspaper market as a 'perfect storm'. The increasing share of advertising budgets taken by the web, rising print prices and a recession are combining to put pressure on printed news as never before.

Alan Rusbridger recently explained The Guardian's price rise to £1.20 in these terms,

"All newspapers are being buffeted by a number of forces, not least the digital revolution, which is competing for attention and sucking advertising, especially jobs advertising, out of print. If fewer people buy newspapers (and our bit of the market has shrunk 9% over the past six months) that's less revenue. If, because of a tough economic climate or changing technologies, fewer people advertise in print, that's less revenue still."

I'm not going to try to claim I have the answer to these problems. However a trend is emerging in the digital versions of our traditional news outlets, which I'm certain is not the answer.

I reviewed the excellent Flat Earth News a while ago and that book makes a fantastic case for the churnalistic echo chamber that our news outlets have become. If one paper reports a story, then all can report it as fact, referencing the first that ran it. If it's sourced from a wire service, it's gospel and need not be checked, even though wire services are under huge financial pressure themselves and so are cutting back on their own checking.

Traditional news outlets are trying to use their presence on the web to position themselves as a higher quality source of information and debate than social media. You'd expect more reliable information and a better standard of debate from The Guardian or the BBC, than you'd find on Twitter. It's a sensible strategy.

Unfortunately, cost cutting and a desire not to miss out on information that people can source from outlets like Twitter is also seeing their quality eroded.

At the moment, this is largely visible in news outlets' Live Blogs. Take this example from the BBC's football transfer deadline day coverage.

Transfer deadline day is very much silly season for rumours, but if I want pure speculation, there's plenty to be found on Twitter. If the BBC's only bringing me the same speculation I can find elsewhere, then what is its purpose?

An example on a more serious story appeared on The Guardian website yesterday in their coverage of the Dale Farm eviction case.

Several commentors on the article (inlcuding me) had argued that even though plenty of reporters were present at the site, we'd heard very little from local residents' on their opinions of the planned eviction. Plenty from lawyers, politicians, celebrities and the travellers who live on the site; almost nothing from their neighbours.

Eventually, the writers of the Live Blog cobbled together a few opinions from people commenting on the article who 'claim to be local to the site'. It was a weak solution to an element of the story that the reporters could see they needed to cover. Crucially, it's only the relatively low volume of comments on Wallpapering Fog that stops me from doing exactly the same thing here. If I hit any one of the multitude of current affairs forums and nicked a bit of content, I could do exactly the same thing here. For The Guardian to stand above social media, it needs to do more.

It's a small symptom of a growing problem. When our news outlets just serve commentary that they've sourced unchecked from social media, what is their purpose? I can visit social media directly and I can't easily check the claims made there either.

This sort of tactic will work for a while as organisations like The Guardian are able to live on their reputations, but gradually, those repuations are being eroded. Like a brand that becomes addicted to price discounting, they buy cheap sales now, at the expense of the future value of the company.

Our traditional news media need to cut costs and to adapt, but if they don't set themselves apart from social media by differentiating on quality then they'll have no future at all.

Quick conclusions from the riot coverage

I watched the riot coverage across a variety of outlets until too late last night. Here are a few thoughts...

• The rioters didn't organise using Twitter, they used Blackberry Messenger. People watching used Twitter.
  
  
• Did you hear that Daily Mail? BBM and Twitter are not the same thing.
  
  
• During a developing story, Twitter > Sky News > BBC News
  
  
• During a developing story, you're better off following interesting journalists on Twitter than reading the content of theirs that makes newspaper websites
  
  
• If TV news channels haven't got helicopters up, they won't be showing any coverage that you haven't already seen
  
  
• Somebody really needs to tell our news outlets about UStream
  
  
• What happened to webcams? I swear there used to be more.
  
  
• If it was truly Armageddon, somebody would still be posting marketing news to your Twitter feed.
  
  

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Take the long view. Except in a crisis.

There are many similarities between marketing mix modelling (econometrics) and weather forecasting. They both use data on the past to try to predict the future - though I'd be the first to admit that weather forecasting is harder - and they both struggle badly when you knock them out of their comfort zone. Neither forecasts well when they're in a situation that they haven't seen before.

Weather forecasts in the UK are, to put it kindly, struggling this week. My lovely new HTC phone brings me weather alerts and on Saturday it went from forecasting not really any snow, to heavy snow, to very heavy snow in the space of a few hours. Half an hour after it made up its mind that we were going to get some proper weather, the heavens opened and London went very white and very pretty in the space of about two hours.


There's a marketing angle coming, I promise.

I'd normally argue against taking a day-by-day view of marketing ROI. It's unproductive and it hides the big picture. Retailers especially have an obsession with yesterday's takings which is brilliant for stock control but terrible for working out whether your ad campaign is effective. Advertising has at least medium term effects and you're really looking to build a brand over the long term, so asking your analysts to spend their day working out why Tuesday was 0.5% down year-on-year is distracting at best.

This short term obsession ties in nicely with social media reporting. We're sure we need to track it - how many new Facebook friends, twitter mentions and positive blog posts - but nobody really seems to be able to explain why. If I've got an up to the minute tweet dashboard, what do I do with it? What do I change in my business?

The weather's just given us an example. Forecasts are unreliable and we're out of our comfort zone. What the hell is going on? Is the snow headed our way?

#UKSnow knows.


#UKSnow takes a hashtag on Twitter, a postcode and a report of how heavy the snow is, then maps all the tweets for you. Fabulous! It's doing better today than the Met Office rainfall radar; it updates faster and is reporting snow where the Met Office isn't (in places where it's definitely snowing!)

Most of the time the long view is the best one, but just occasionally, when our models get knocked out of their comfort zone there's a real use for social media dashboards. They can bring us information far faster and more accurately than a model ever could. Provided every day isn't nominated a crisis day, social media tracking is a powerful analysis tool.

Sure the Marketing Directors are wrong?

Brand Republic is reporting on a survey that says one in five marketing directors would rather the IT department handle their social media than the in-house PR unit (original press release here.)

"Seriously that is what the survey (by Wildfire PR) of 250 marketing directors and heads of marketing even found — one in five marketing chiefs believe the IT department should have control of a firm’s blogging and tweeting"

And PR Week on the subject...

"Rob Dyson, PR manager at children’s charity Whizz-Kidz, said: ‘Clearly a number of marketers believe social media are technical tools or an extension of the company website that IT should manage. But it is not just a bit of software and needs to be run by a part of an organisation that is personable."

Maybe they do believe it and maybe they don't, but rather than assuming - like a lot of commenters on the articles - that all those marketing directors don't know what they're doing, how about an alternative conclusion?

One in five marketing directors think so little of their PR team's ability to handle social media, that they'd rather IT did it instead.

Disagree? That's why the question is crying out for a follow up.

1. Who do you think should handle your social media?
2. WHY?

Otherwise what can you learn except to assume that 20% of marketing directors don't understand your industry?