Those of you who follow me on other social nets like Twitter or Facebook know that I am pretty opinionated when it comes to politics.  Suffice to say that I am a card-carrying member of the “Liberal Coastal Elites.”  (I try not to over-indulge or bore folks with it; and I certainly can play nice with my right-leaning friends.)

I bring it all up only as a segue to the fact that I am a big fan of Andrew Sullivan’s Dish blog.  Sullivan’s one of the big dogs in blogging; he’s been freshly-empowered by his move to the Daily Beast to experiment with new technologies; thus I increasingly look to The Dish not just for political musings but as a pioneer exploring the future of the medium.

In recent weeks, for example, Sullivan hosted a live-chat with over 8,000 readers, to debate his ballyhooed NEWSWEEK cover story.  He implemented an “Ask Andrew Anything” video series featuring his rotoscoped image waxing on issues large and small.  He’s also live-blogged most of the GOP debates and caucuses — all with the help of only a handful of staffers. It’s a lean yet media-savvy organization that manages to post a mix of original and curated content upwards of 10x a day.

In a post last week, really almost a throwaway, Sullivan notified his readers that he and his team would be live-blogging the South Carolina contest:

“Yes, we’ll be live-blogging the results from South Carolina tonight starting at 7 pm. When I say ‘we’ I don’t mean it royally. We all scour the web and the in-tray for data, ideas, views, reactions, images, as they come in, and I organize it all into a single post and write it in real time.

“The kind of journalism that no one was ever expecting to do until a few years’ ago.”

That may overstate things: while few expected bloggers to become so sophisticated, what’s actually happening is that premier blogs are becoming more like broadcast outlets than websites.  This is not so much a journalism issue as a speed+consistency issue.  As Sullivan has noted:

“Matt Drudge told me when I sought advice from the master in 2001, (that) the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.”  

Two of the top blogs in the world?  Drudge‘s and Sullivan’s.  Speed kills.

It’s the end of the Web as we know it: the more online we are, the more we expect the web to mirror the real time tv networks.  It’s the beginning of the end of the static web.  We’ll cease to think of it as a text/narrative-based medium soon enough.

With this in mind, if you are a brand considering a more aggressive Content Marketing strategy in 2012 … Will you be able to keep pace?

One of those automated spambots on Twitter informed me that today was my 5–year anniversary of microblogging.  Wow.  Five years.  Really?

What was I up to five years ago?

I was living in Boston, in-between my family’s quinquennial moves to San Francisco.  My brain was on fire, as I’d hit upon a worthy successor to the Social Media News Release concept and was just a couple of weeks away from debuting the Social Media Newsroom template.

As I look back, 2007 was a prolific time for the entire Social Media industry.  It was not only the year Twitter started its remarkable run, but was also a time when Facebook was becoming truly important to the wider world; when bloggers were getting their due; when SXSW was worth attending; when the Echo Chamber was fully formed.  Some of my best thinking was produced in that timeframe, as I do a quick review of my “Jedi Academy” posts.  This was the era before Social Media Experts and dashboards and marketing automation and near-daily must-attend seminars.

Now, of course, everything is so … sophisticated.  The money is flowing.  Much of the ideas come from companies latching on to a sustainable trend vs. individuals sharing a passion.  I don’t bemoan the loss of that more innocent age.  The profit motivations don’t bother me a bit.  I only worry that the best ideas don’t always get a fair shake.

When I learned it was my 5–year anniversary, my next thought was, “Can I envision a 10–year anniversary on Twitter?”  I’ll admit, my gut reaction was, “NFW.”  Then again: why not?  Twitter, Google and Facebook have each done a far more credible job of embedding themselves in our daily lives than old stars like AOL, MySpace, Friendster, etc.  … And they are minting money, with no end in sight.  … And they are cultural touchstones in a way that those bygone services were not.  These three companies – Facebook, Apple, Twitter and Google – are the titans of this new age; they could well outlast us all.  … Which is why I worry that the best ideas don’t always get a fair shake, unless they can show how they complement (vs. threaten) one or more of those companies.

So I guess that’s what I miss, 5 years later: the sense that anything was possible; the sense that anyone could make a difference; the idea that anyone could win this thing.

It’s called growing up.

Unfortunately, the chance of arriving at a standard set of metrics for every brand is small. Brand goals differ, as do the metrics tied to those brand goals. It has been this way in public relations for years, and it’s likely to be that way with social media as well.

Similarly, communications professionals should be leery of approaches that advocate measuring social like we’ve measured advertising, or any other communications discipline. We’ve seen this story before with Advertising Value Equivalencies. Not only do AVEs assume that public relations and advertising carry the same value within an organization, but the math behind some of the calculations is suspect at best. If you would like to read more on the subject, check out Don Bartholomew’s blog. It’s a treasure trove of posts discrediting the use of AVEs.

If standardization isn’t likely and comparing social media measurement to other communications disciplines directly is problematic, what can be achieved?  For me, I think we can do two things to improve social media measurement.

#1 – Understanding basic measurement principles – It seems that with the explosion of social media, we’ve lost sight of proper communications planning. That includes:

• Benchmark research – Through listening and the examination of brand pages, social media provides a wealth of data for analysis. That doesn’t mean, however, that we should abandon primary research methods as well. Surveys and focus groups are necessary to truly understand underlying behaviors before launching a program.
• Objective setting – The objective needs to clearly articulate what the program is trying to achieve. Most importantly, a proper objective includes the behavior you are trying to impact; a rate of change and a period of time you think it will take to change that behavior.
• Identifying metrics – This is a pretty obvious step, but it is often done retroactively when it needs to be considered in each stage of the program, planning included. These metrics should match the strategies and objectives. If they don’t, pick new metrics.
• Strategies and tactics – Again, somewhat elementary, but the number of times that strategies and tactics don’t match objectives would stun a team of oxen. Don’t make that mistake. Keep the broader objective in your passenger seat at all times.

The other critical component of Measurement 101 is understanding how all of this ties back to what the business is trying to achieve. This speaks mostly to objective setting, but it’s worth calling out separately. If your objectives and subsequent tactical elements do not speak to making the business money, saving the business money, driving up intent to purchase, making a customer more likely to recommend your product or increasing loyalty you should consider revisiting those strategies and tactics. I guarantee you it is the only thing your client or bosses boss cares about at the end of the day.

#2 – Integrating communications to create one measurement framework – Recently, FastCompany posted an interesting approach to measuring all digital components using an aggregate score. That approach is certainly useful, but I think it’s time we start thinking about all communications when we’re conceiving a measurement framework. Social media doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and neither does traditional (whatever that means anymore) communications. An aggregate score is likely the best approach, but we have to start thinking about measurement like we think about communications – a strategic and holistic marketing practice tied to business objectives, not a singular tactic. Otherwise we’re measuring each of the channels without any context.

As my friend Tom Webster would say, you have to do the work. The solution to your measurement conundrum isn’t going to be presented on a silver platter. But, if you incorporate the measurement basics and think about how the measurement framework you’re developing can be integrated, you’ll be one step ahead of the competition.

What about you? What measurement challenges have you faced?

Chuck Hemann is currently Director, Analytics for WCG in Austin, Texas. For the past seven years he has provided strategic counsel to clients on a variety of topics including digital analytics, traditional measurement, online reputation, social media, investor relations and crisis communications. Chuck can be found online on Twitter and on his blog.

Sorry it’s been a while since my last post.  I was recharging the batteries. 

In-between sitting by the fire, walking the dog, going to the movies, etc., I got to thinking about Social Media. 

It’s gotten so … big. 

There are something like 800M folks on Facebook.  Walk away from your Twitter account to grab lunch, and there are 1,500 unseen tweets waiting in queue.  Social Media has even been given outsized (if controversial) credit for powering the Arab Spring.

Crazy, right?  And when you are a marketer? — Unwieldy.

Here’s what Mitch Wagner at The CMO Site wrote today, quoting new Altimeter Research findings:

Big brands are managing an overwhelming number of social media accounts, with an average of 178 accounts per company, according to a recent study. (Altimeter surveyed 144 enterprise-class corporations, with 1,000 employees or more, including Applebee’s, Avaya, Caterpillar, Hallmark, JP Morgan Chase, Newell Rubbermaid, and Western Union.)

Companies launched social media with little planning, and without standardized processes, according to Altimeter Group analyst Jeremiah Owyang. Companies that don’t get control are at risk of abandoned accounts, inconsistent experience for customers, and untrained employees creating a crisis…

“Like a disease, social media proliferation will leave companies crippled — unless they develop a strategy to manage now,” the Altimeter Group said in a report. “Beyond coordination challenges, unchecked accounts and disparate customer interactions expose brands to a host of legal, compliance and fragmented brand-perception risks.”

I wrote about this very issue two years ago.  I don’t bring that up to remind you of my prescience (you should be well aware of that by now –  heh), but as a signal that this situation is getting worse.  Here’s an excerpt from that ancient post:

In the end such companies will have hundreds – maybe thousands – of “stray” Social Media sites/accounts.  Inconsistent.  Abandoned.  Off-kilter.  Hardly any of these independent Social Media efforts do a good job of boosting the master brand, yet all of them are still clearly affiliated: dragging down the brand, calling out the lack of strategy.

This is not a call for control for controlling’s sake; it’s a call for planning for brand’s sake.

So, given that it’s the New Year and folks are prediction-happy, here’s a prophesy for 2012…

This will be the year that brands wake up to the need for a sound strategy for Social Media.  And this will mean tighter corporate controls.  This is the year that “engagement” will start to become boring.

There will be many who shake their fists as The Man buckles down (and buttons up) on this stuff.  But never fear, the genie is out of the bottle.  The days when the last resort of an aggrieved consumer was the Better Business Bureau or a letter-writing campaign are long gone. Social Media is inextricably woven into the larger mediasphere: monitored by brands and mainstream media for smoke signals that will never again be ignored.

Meanwhile, hey, even if the brand marketers start self-policing (i.e., become boring), we can still chat at unprecedented scale with each other.  That part’s fun too.

Around here we just call it McDonald’s, in-between the high-fives and exultations of “I’m lovin’ it!”

While the work doesn’t officially begin until January, we’ve already plunged elbow deep into the culture of the company. 

If you’re the type who still holds an image of McD’s from the era of “Supersize Me,” I want to disabuse you of such notions.  I won’t go so far as to suggest anyone eat a Big Mac every day, but from my interactions with the franchise owners thus far, I can tell you this:  I have rarely met a group of more honest, candid, professional and high integrity people.  They don’t want you to eat a Big Mac every day, either.  They genuinely care about what they serve, and have been working quite diligently to improve the nutritional value and overall quality of the menu. 

We’re hoping that our work in the mainstream media and across Social Media channels will help convince yaz; meanwhile, take my word for it:  I eat at McD’s often in my travels, and still boast 6–pack abs.  (Well, okay, maybe it’s a 4–pack –  but I blame distilled spirits, not burgers.)

In any event, a Big Win for your pals at SHIFT.  As I told the McDonald’s judging committee during our final pitch, pointing to an agency roster filling-up with Fortune 1000 brands:

“Each one of these wins represents an occasion when SHIFT came in as the underdog.  In every single case we were competing for these big brands against global agencies — hoping that the chip on our shoulder would be enough to convince the decision makers that SHIFT was the right choice.”

And with that, I raise my McCafé Peppermint Hot Chocolate and wish you all a Happy Holiday!!