From Our Brains to Yours
How is [fill in the blank] helping my organization meet its mission?
While we generally shy away from making predictions about the future, we feel pretty comfortable with this one: insofar as 2009 was the year of analytics, particularly for online communications, 2010 will be the year of measurement.
2009 was all about finding and using new tools to identify numbers to attach to communications activities. The sector grew more sophisticated in terms of thinking about numbers to track and tools to track them. From Google Analytics to Facebook Fan Page Insights, information that used to be utterly unavailable or accessible only to tech geeks very comfortable with the programming back end of the inter-tubes is now readily available to most anyone with a login.
2010 will be about figuring out what those numbers mean, and how to apply them to measuring the inputs, outputs, and results that matter for non-profits and advocacy efforts.
Our friend Shabbir Safdar is ahead of the curve. Last week he published, “How are my efforts on facebook contributing to my organization’s overall goals?” While I’m not sure he’d describe it this way, I read it as a salvo on the notion that our various outputs – status updates, wall posts, exhortations to “become a fan” – are necessarily distinct from desired outputs – donations, volunteer hours, petition signatures, etc.
Quoting Shabbir:
While PR measurement experts like KD Paine (one of my heroes) can measure things like “message retention” of your social networking efforts, the easy way to measure the effectiveness of this work on facebook is to track how it hits your bottom line. When your efforts results in an organization-wide goal (money, volunteers, sponsors) that is easy to understand even by people who don’t understand the Internet, there’s no debate about the benefit or budgeting of Facebook.
You can create a few metrics from a couple of basic data points:
1. the number of fans you have on a given day you make a fan page status post (gathered from your Fan Page Insights);
2. the number of fans that click on the link to your landing page; and
3. the number of conversions these visits from Facebook generate.
From these data points, you can then build and track the following actionable metrics:
1. clickthru rate of your facebook posts;
2. conversion rate of facebook traffic; and
3. conversion rate of all other “organic” traffic.
Once you have these metrics, you should be able to examine them and look to connect improvements or degradations in the results to specific actions. Do all my status updates without a photo perform worse than those with a photo of the land being conserved? Then we should always use a photo!
And he goes on to take on one of the sacred cows of social networking more generally – that engagement is what really matters (we took this cow on awhile back, too: Organizations Don’t Have Friends, and Three Things: Engagement? But I’m Already Married!)
Your first reaction to seeing this might be “Hey, wait, I’ve got lots of people clicking ‘Like’ on my status updates, and ‘Share’ and playing my videos. Doesn’t that count for something?”
Well, to be concise about it, not really.
Shabbir closes out his post with detailed instructions for applying analytics to measuring results – outputs that matter when it comes to furthering your organization’s mission.
So, our first (and maybe our only) prediction for 2010: more of the communications sector will go the way of Shabbir, away from analytics per se and toward improved measurement. At least, we hope so. (And we hope you’ll read his whole post, especially if your organization is expending resources on Facebook.)