A new article in Adweek describes advertising executives’ opinions on the value of ‘conversation’. The word Twitter was ominously absent throughout the article but nevertheless a goldmine of information was unveiled about how the top ad agencies deal with the more abstract forms of chattering; the interactions taking place on social networks like MySpace and Facebook. If you don’t have a lot of time, read these answers by agencies quoted to the question “How Do You Measure Conversation?” The full article is here.
Clickable: “[Conversational marketing measurement]’s still in its infancy. Marketers are trying to bridge the divide of what the metrics mean and then put them into action.”
Google: Is finding it hard to run effective ads in social media. The company signed a deal in August 2006 to run search and contextual ads on MySpace.
Fox Interactive Media: “We’ve taken a step backwards with people talking about click-through rates.”
ComScore-Starcom: “Frequent ad clickers aren’t the best customers.”
MySpace/Carat: Quantify the extra value advertisers get from campaigns that combine traditional banner ads with community pages that include downloadable content that can spread virally through the site. Measurement of ad exposures/clicks (the traditional method) plus data on visits to community pages, time spent there, whether visitors watched a video or embedded a piece of content in their page, tracking the pass-along rate for pieces of portable content, to one degree. Outcome thus far: More than half the value of MySpace campaigns comes from letting users download wallpaper, embed videos and add brands as ‘friends’ (endorsements outweighin the effect on consumers from standard ad messaging).
Deep Focus: Loosening up the criteria; counting up clicks, visits, pass-alongs and other data, but leave room for more qualitative gauges that may not fit neatly into a spreadsheet. MySpace and other places have a predicament: Social media is not a short-term play like ad campaigns that launch and nearly immediately begin losing value. A well-executed social media campaign reverses this trend, increasing its worth as time elapses and communities grow. A new type measurement was added, called “cause-and-effect”/”dynamic” measurement. One key metric from the effort: T-shirts. The community began asking for show merchandise. Deep Focus responded by designing downloadable decals, the most popular of which became the show’s official T-shirt.
Nielsen Buzzmetrics: “Social media measurement is like radar”. “You can’t fly a plane without radar. The question is how much radar do you need.” The challenge is conversations that cut across organizational silos.
TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony: No one set of metrics can apply to such a diverse set of constituencies, and it’s highly unlikely that the incumbent measuring methods 100% cover the consumer base. “The big issue is do any of these metrics relate to the real world?”
Radian6: “The online ad world has page views, impressions and clicks. That kind of thing doesn’t exist yet in social media.”
