Welcome to the Melcrum Social Media Newsletter.

In our new report, How to use social media to engage employees, communication research and measurement expert Angela Sinickas shares her ideas on how to get around the seemingly abstract task of measuring your social media initiatives. She advises shifting the focus of measurement from activity to outcomes.

Here are Angela’s thoughts on making this shift:

1. Measures of activities
A number of firms offer services or software that reports how often your company name appears in blogs, discussion threads and chat rooms. Some even categorize the mentions as positive or negative. Some of the content analysis of the posts is done by automated software; other services use people to judge whether the mentions are positive or negative for your organization. The former method is less expensive, but the latter tends to be more accurate.

Other measures for blogs include counting the number of people commenting on a blog as an indication of engagement with the blog, the blogger, the topic of the blog or the organization hosting the blog.

2. Measures of outcomes
Measuring activity surrounding the use of new media should just be a starting point. For example, which is more important to know: the total number of people who visited a particular blog, or finding out that just one of those readers was a reporter who ended up writing a major article affecting your organization, based on information first learned through the blog?

To make more meaningful measurements of new technology, you need to research the impact of the original blog postings or comments on desirable behaviors benefiting your organization.

External outcomes of blogs might be more people buying your product or applying for jobs at your company, or fewer people organizing protest demonstrations in front of your headquarters.

Desirable outcomes of internal blogs could be greater sharing of best practices that reduce company expenses or increase revenue. You could identify if employees’ use of RSS feeds has reduced the amount of time they spend scanning multiple external websites. Then, compare the value of the saved time in terms of payroll, with the cost of setting up the feeds.

3. How to track outcomes
When measuring the impact of new technologies, start with some type of desirable business result and identify the stakeholder behaviors that will lead to that result. Then, you can apply different techniques to connect the communication method to the results.

For example, once some people change their behavior, ask them to what extent different types of communication influenced their behavior change. This will help you to see what role the newer electronic media played in comparison to more traditional information sources.

Excerpted from How to use social media to engage employees: strategies to improve communication and collaboration.


Best wishes,

Alex Manchester,
Editor
alex.manchester@melcrum.com

This week's Melcrum headlines:

Global networking site for communicators announced
- The Hub, UK - 9 May 2007

Is Second Life getting too similar to real life?
- The Melcrum Blog - 9 May 2007

A world without email...
- Black Belt Dojo - 11 May 2007