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Conquering the Social Media Blues Five Steps to Social Media Performance Management March, 2008

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THE SOCIAL MEDIA BLUES

Ok, I need to rant. My head is spinning. I have too much to do and not enough people. Every day there seems to be some new thing to pay attention to. Yesterday, someone told me I need to “check out Social Thing, it’s just like Friend Feed only better”. What the heck is a Social Thing? The analysts from Forrester tell me “social networking will be like air.” I don’t know about air. It seems like I’m drowning in sea of Diigos, Pownces, Twitters, Jaikus and Tumblrs. Yeah, I know Facebook, MySpace and OpenSocial are big things, but what about all this other stuff? And what about my site? It needs work too. The to-do list seems endless and everybody is stretched. What makes it worse is that everyday someone is coming up with something new to add to the list. And too much of it is a waste of time. If I hear one more proposal for a Facebook application that’s basically a video player I’m going to puke. I know this can be big if you get it right. Some kid from Stanford launched an application and got almost 3 million installs. Can you believe it? But it can turn out really badly too.

Some kid from Stanford launched an application and got

almost 3 million installs. Can you

believe it?

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Just look at the eBay apps. eBay launched a Facebook application and got fewer than 4,000 installs. They launched another one and got only 500 installs. OMG, that must be embarrassing to someone. Who knows what’s going to work? And I’m sick and tired of people telling me what we need to do differently. I get it already. UGC is here to stay. Social networking is huge and getting bigger. Walled gardens are failures. We need to be part of the “conversation”. What I need is some order to the chaos.

****************** If you’ve felt the social media blues, you’re not alone. We are living in an era of unprecedented change, and the organizations at the center of the change are often relatively new, growing really fast and struggling with under-developed management processes – even if they’re attached to bigger, more established companies. The challenges of rapid growth are well known and not unique to social media. Small organizations stay aligned and coordinate informally; with rapid growth, these informal mechanisms break down and different parts of the organization can ricochet in competing directions. Opportunities for further growth seem boundless, and investment in new initiatives and new businesses can proliferate without consideration of financial return or strategic fit. Social and interactive media are no strangers to these phenomena.

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If it feels chaotic, that’s because it is. The challenge is how to balance chaos and control in a way that focuses resources, creativity and innovation on driving both near term and long term success. Balancing that chaos/control cycle in this environment is what we call social media performance management. It’s a management approach that applies a metrics philosophy to product development, product marketing, and business planning, so that resources can be focused and success can be repeated. The metrics philosophy that’s employed typically needs to be consistent with the performance criteria of broadcast media, but incorporates the interactive dynamics of social media. Social media performance management and measurement is critical to managing successful growth. It aligns management around success strategies and shared goals to provide your staff with the guide posts for making decisions consistent with the interest of the business. Done well, it will create or reinforce a culture of continuous improvement in new content, function, and initiative development.

A well-considered approach to implementing social media performance management can yield significant benefits including a more focused team that sets goals and manages for results.

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FIVE STEPS TO SOCIAL MEDIA PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT Create a measurement framework: The measurement framework is what connects business objectives, goals, activities/events and measures. It provides the context for how specific sub-goals can integrate up to primary goals. The figure below is an illustration of a high level of the framework that connects top level goals with both the income statement and the balance sheet. From here, we can drill down into more detailed goals that connect specific projects and activities to the enterprise goals.

Illustrative Measurement Framework

Establish competitive objectives: Goals without reasonable “stretch” targets can be frustrating and de-motivating to the organization. It’s important to establish a

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baseline of performance for the enterprise over time and for competitors against which targets can be set. Build disciplined management processes: Well designed business processes are

required to support an organization that can operate effectively without senior management intervention at every critical step. The rapid growth and relative youth of interactive organizations means that business processes are often underdeveloped, resulting in inconsistent direction and rework across the organization. We suggest that process improvement be focused on high leverage processes that are critical to managing the chaos of the social web. Design systems to support performance management: Significant changes in system support are required as we move from a Web 1.0 version of analytics to the Web 2.0 version of analytics. The focus of the data model shifts from visitors at points in time to users over time. The

complexity also increases substantially as we need to go from browser/single site tracking to multi-client/multi-site tracking and therefore must rely more heavily on APIs. These changes, while significant, can be tackled much more efficiently by establishing a solid measurement framework and priorities up front. Drive continuous improvement: The measurement framework and consistent, durable management processes are central to making continuous improvement a reality. They anchor the organization in what’s important and create the environment for institutional learning. With these foundational elements in place, leadership can encourage and reward a mindset of continuous incremental changes, rapid testing cycles, and ongoing learning and improvement.

The rapid growth and relative youth of

interactive organizations means that business processes are often underdeveloped…

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A FEW THINGS TO THINK ABOUT BEFORE IMPLEMENTING These five steps suggest a reasonable sequence of activity in bringing social media performance management to an organization, one that we’ve found to be successful. But social media performance management implementation is not one-size-fits-all. Here are some of the more important considerations that will have an impact on the best way to implement social media performance management for your organization: Senior Team Participation: Everyone’s so busy. It’s tempting to think about this as another initiative that gets delegated to a project team, and get back to business. But social media performance management is about getting the whole team, starting with the senior team, on board with a new way of thinking about goals, performance, and how to manage the business. What approach will most efficiently achieve senior team participation and buy-in without taxing their time unnecessarily? Strategy vs. Goals: You’re putting together a framework for measurement, goals and objectives, which depends on a reasonably aligned view of business strategy. Chances are, however, that if you’re suffering from social media blues, the senior team is less aligned on strategy than you might think. How much of the framework building and objective setting steps should be invested in summarizing, and where needed re-aligning, strategic focus? What and Where to Pilot: Change is hard, and when you’re trying it for the first time, it’s best to focus on the most important areas, and start small. This philosophy applies to the implementation of management processes and performance measurement systems. Which are your most critical management processes? For initiative-based processes, which initiatives should you start with, balancing learning, impact, and likelihood of success? For measurement systems, what measures can be implemented most rapidly, and which are most important?

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Learn by Doing: You might have gathered from What and Where to Pilot that continuous improvement, if it’s not already an integral part of your culture, should start with the way you manage the social media performance management effort. In fact, you can use the effort as a test bed for piloting many of the things that you want to change in the way you manage your business. Which of those changes are you ready to start trying now, and how can you bake them into your implementation approach?

Integration with Broader Company: Many social media organizations are part of larger, more established companies. There are some advantages to achieving broader company buy-in, but also a great risk of slowing everything down if you do it too broadly, too early. Where and how should you approach the broader organization in the effort? What broader corporate objectives and synergy opportunities can you build into the performance measurement framework?

Continuous improvement … should start with the way you manage the social

media performance management effort

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NOW YOU CAN START Social media performance management is not rocket science. A lot of it is about applying general management best practices to your rapidly growing, rapidly changing business. There are a number of challenging aspects to getting it right. In particular, striking the balance between chaos and control requires as much art as science; and developing and implementing an effective set of measures that capture the interactive dynamics of social media can require a substantial dose of science. Finally, putting social media performance management in place can be difficult precisely for the reasons why your organization needs it most – you need to break through a chaotic, fragmented, resource constrained environment to get it done. So start small but don’t under-resource the effort, and adopt a continuous improvement mindset to break the effort into digestible pieces with quick payback and learning.

The rewards of a focused team, insight into social media success, and more controlled chaos await you.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Alex Nesbitt is co-editor of Digital Podcast. In addition, through Digital Strategy, Alex actively advises companies in the social and new media value chain to help them more successfully monetize their businesses. He focuses on turning communities into economies, engaging and activating super fans, and optimizing revenue.

Andrew Krainin is co-editor of Digital Podcast. In addition, Andrew is active in Digital Strategy’s consulting work, where he advises companies on social media marketing, online performance management, and revenue yield improvement. Andrew also has a passion for the video game industry, and is developing new insights into how video game companies can grow faster and more profitably.

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ABOUT DIGITAL Digital is a new media strategy and podcast production company, firmly focused on the business of digital media. As a strategy partner, Digital Strategy, we help interactive media companies and brands to more effectively engage, activate and monetize audience. We offer our clients research and consulting in a range of new media domains including:

• Performance measurement and management for social and interactive media • Audience and content development through social media and community

strategy • Revenue optimization through interactive media sales and operations planning • Content delivery and syndication process management

As Digital Podcast, we produce original research and news about digital media, and help our clients create, promote and distribute podcast content through:

• Content strategy • Training • Design, development, and production services • Promotion, delivery and RSS syndication • Tracking and analysis

We encourage you to learn more about us online at www.digitalpodcast.com/company.

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