Jim Sterne's Social Media Metrics

I've just finished reading Jim Sterne's new (ish) book, Social Media Metrics, How to Measure and Optimize your Marketing Investment, published by Wiley. I recommend it. “We are what we measure” may be a tired cliché, but Sterne nevertheless brings a fresh perspective to the subject and drives home why measurement may be the foundation for building a successful social media program.

The book does a great job of linking social media metrics to things that matter in business, what Sterne describes as The Big Three Goals of increasing revenue, lowering cost, or improving customer satisfaction. These goals may sound lofty or even unattainable to some, but Sterne is, well, stern in his views: If social media can't make a meaningful impact on the business, why bother at all? This tone distinguishes the book from the many volumes of fluffy nonsense written about social media.

From here, Sterne constructs the book around the logical steps necessary to attaining meaningful business results. At each step the book suggests ways to measure activity and drive toward a desired outcome. I was glad Sterne wasn't afraid to address the real costs associated with a rigorous social media program, and take this on as a metric (borrowed from Avinash Kaushik).

The book has its faults. It could have done with an edit, and I wish Sterne had talked more about the practicality of measuring things, and the tools that can support ongoing measurement. I also found issue with some of the discussion around “identifying influence”, but these are small gripes. If you've ever pondered how to measure the meaningful impact of social media on your business, this is a good book to buy.

A definitive list of social media measurement & metrics tools?

(Updated December 2, 2011)

Last week Jeremiah Owyang at the Altimeter Group, along with his colleague John Lovett, published a nice report on social media analytics. It's a very useful framework for thinking through how to measure the rights things, which in turn will focus attention on the right kinds of activities.

But how to measure? Way back in 2006, Owyang took a snapshot of the companies that offer tools for social media metrics, and came up with a list of forty-two firms. In the last week I've trawled the web to update his list (and thanks to Ken Burbary for a nice wiki list of different tools), and come up with an astonishing 82 firms that offer some kind of social media measurement solution. And I'm pretty sure I've missed a bunch.


Help me update and correct the list. Please send me your additions, along with any other comments on these tools, and I'll post an update. If there's enough interest, I'll also try and categorize these solutions better -- there's certainly a lot of diversity in this list.


SOCIAL MEDIA MEASUREMENT TOOLS

Updated: February 11 2011

Company	Comments
Alterian	SMM
Appinions	SMM
Andiamo Systems	SMM
Attensity	SMM
Attentio	Multilingual
Beyond Analysis	Gone
Beevolve	SMM
Biz360	Acquired by Attensity.
BrandIntel	Gone
Brandwatch	Brand monitoring
BurrellesLuce	SMM
Buzzcapture	SMM
BuzzGain	Meltwater Group Product
BuzzLogic	Now TwelveFold Media
BuzzNumbers	SMM
CIC Business Consulting	BI tool Chinese market
Cision	SMM + other tools
Collective Intellect	SMM
ComMetric	Mapping to financial data and stock tickers
Converseon	Agency with some tools
Cover-All Technologies	No longer supporting SMM
Crimson Hexagon	SMM
CustomScoop	SMM
CyberAlert	SMM
Cyveillance	Brand monitoring, QinetiQ company
Cymfony	SMM + other tools
Dow Jones & Company Insight	SMM + other tools
EchoMetrix	Gone
eCairn	SaaS metrics solution
EmPower Research	Custom technology solutions
Ethority	SMM
Evolve24	SMM
Jive	FilterBox product.
HowSociable	Free gadget
Imooty	SMM
Infegy	Brand monitoring
Integrasco	SMM
Intelligence Technologies	Gone out of business
JamIQ	Asian languages
J.D. Power and Associates	acquired Umbria
Jodange	See Appinions
Kaleidico	No longer supporting SMM
Kaava Corporation	Marketing services, some SMM
KDPaine and Partners	No tools but strong analysis
ListenLogic	social CRM?
Lexalytics	Sentiment detection
Linkfluence	French language
Lithium	Social CRM
Market Sentinel	Brand monitoring
mBlast	SMM
MediaBadger	Consulting firm with tools
MediaHound	SMM competitive intelligence
MediaMiser	Media monitoring
Meltwater News	Media monitoring
MetaTale	Gone.
Metrica	Multilingual, part of Gorkana Group
Millward Brown	Precis
Moreover technologies	SMM
Netemic	SMM
NetEquity	Gone.
New Media Strategies	No longer supporting SMM
Nielsen Online	NetRatings
Onalytica	SMM
OneRiot	Gone.
PRMetrics	Free customizable social media portal
Radian6	SMM, acquired by SalesForce.com
Relevant Noise	See Zeta Interactive
Report International	Brand monitoring
RepuMetrix	Brand monitoring
ReputationHQ	Gone
SAS	Business intelligence tool with SM
SamePoint	Gone
Scanblog	Gone.
ScoutLabs	See Lithium
Sentiment Metrics	Not just sentiment
Socialarc	SMM
SocialMention	Social search engine
Statsit	No longer Relevant
Synthesio	Multilingual
Sysomos	Business intelligence tool
Tealium	No longer relevant
ThoughtBuzz	SMM
TraceBuzz	SMM
Trackur	SMM
Thomson Reuters	BuzzAnalytics and OpinionAnalystics
UberVU	Now Crimson Hexagon
ViralHeat	SMM, Free API
Visible Technologies	SMM
VMS	Gone
Vocus	SMM
WaveMetrix	SMM
Zeta Interactive	Relevant Noise product for SMM

PR Measurement is giving me a headache...

I've spent most of my career in marketing and lately have been concentrating on PR, which I manage for a publicly-traded company.

To say that PR and the media business have changed in the last few years is a bit like saying Bill Gates is comfortably well-off, or Neil Armstrong is a seasoned traveler, or Sarah Palin is low key; it's really hard to overstate the turmoil in the media business, and as a consequence the upheavals in PR (for a great take on how this has impacted tech publishing, see Tom Steinert-Thelkeld's blog).

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the media measurement business. I'm old enough to remember when clips really were clips: pieces of newsprint cut-out from a magazine or newspaper by some exceedingly patient, far-off reader, then painstakingly collated, annotated and mailed to me in a big bulging brown envelope. Today, almost all the news is online and much of it doesn't come from a traditional news outlet, yet most media metrics and coverage monitoring still function as if in an ink-smudged era.

For sure there's a bunch of new companies that have addressed the new media reality, and focused on social networks and brand management: Biz360, Cymfony, BuzzLogic, Vocus and RatePoint are some examples. They all essentially follow the same formula of aggregating digital news using some kind of search and filter system (you can still get the pieces of paper if you need them, but each little clip will cost you more than the newsstand price of the whole publication). The algorithms at the heart of these systems are usually based on fixed keywords (company name, ticker symbol, product names, etc.) then some additional processing based on either rudimentary rules of grammar and syntax or or a series of logical operations, and is often called natural language processing (NLP), since it tries to emulate how humans read and understand text. The results, based on my limited experiences, range from the amazing to the bizarre, and most systems need human intervention to get at subtle things like tone.

In an attempt to add value and differentiate themselves from free services like Google News, these companies also have a vast array of reports and dashboards that slice and dice data to show share-of-voice, on target messaging, competitive coverage, salience and on and on. Again, result may vary from those advertised...

Pricing does not seem to vary much: all cater to a similar audience of complex multinationals, usually in the financial services, pharma, or legal businesses, and costs are high. Or at least they seem high to me.

This complexity has spawned a lot of blogs. K.D. Paines is excellent on PR measurement, although recent posts suggest a level of complexity in getting truly comprehensive metrics that is daunting and might account for the high costs. Ed Moed has a lot of good stuff to say, too (although Ed, I think “What's so funny...” was written by Nick Lowe), and intelligent measurement has a lot to say about social media.

But at the end of the day I get a headache. It should be easy. It should be straightforward. It should be inexpensive. And it isn't. If anyone has ideas on how to crack the PR measurement problem, let me know.