If you’re struggling to make sense of new media, here’s a very helpful resource: The Society for New Communications Research’s report on New Media, New Influencers and Implications for Public Relations. There’s a free pdf download available on the Institute for Public Relations website. Some of my fellow members of SNCR have done a fine job with this study.
“New influencers are beginning to tear at the fabric of traditional marketing and communications, giving rise to a new approach characterized by conversation and community,” said Paul Gillin, SNCR member.
Conducted from September to November 2007 the survey focused on “social media power users,” i.e., communications professionals with a deep knowledge and heavy usage pattern of social media tools including blogs, podcasts, online video, social networks, and other new and emerging communications tools and technologies. .The goals of the study were to discover how organizations:
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Define new influencers;
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Communicate and create relationships with them;
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Use social media to create influence
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Measure the effects of these efforts
Another goal of the study was to use these discoveries to offer a set of recommendations to professional communicators.
One aspect of social media that’s still somewhat murky is how to measure influence and results.There was no clear agreement among respondents on the best criteria to use in determining influence. Here’s what the respondents say they prefer to track when gauging the influence of an organization’s social media initiatives:
1 Search ranking
2 Unique visitors
3 Awareness of program
4 Blog search ranking
5 Inbound links
6 Bottom line increase
7 Positive negative ratio blog posts/comments
8 Feed subscribers
9 # of blog posts or comments
10 Ratio between posts and comments
11 Trackbacks
Do you agree? Is search the #1 metric to use for this?
In evaluating the importance of a blogger or podcaster it looked like this:
1. Quality of content
2. Relevance of content to your organization
3. Web search ranking
4. Name recognition
5. Blog search ranking
6. Frequency of postings
7. Page visits
8. Quoted or interviewed in traditional media
9. Business/media affiliation
10. # of comments on blog
11. Content syndication
12. Longevity
13. Distribution for the podcast
In social networks the top three criteria reflect the importance of online engagement: participation level, frequency of posting by the community member and name recognition of the individual. The principal difference between how they rank influence in a social network and those for blogs and podcasts is that many social networks are gated and don’t show up on search engine results. So the metrics favored align more to the number of connections an influencer has within a network, and the overall level of his or her activity, as indicated by questions and comments. in fact the #1 result was ‘other. ’ Then came:
- Participation level in the community
- Frequency of posting
- Name recognition
- # of people linked to
- Profile of the member
- Business/Media affiliation
- Interviewed or quoted in traditional media
- Participation level in other community sites
- Demographic profile linked members
The top line conclusions:
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Social media is rapidly becoming a core channel for disseminating information.
- Blogs, online video and social networks are currently the most popular social media tools
- The top criteria for determining the relevance and potential influence of a blogger or podcaster are: Quality of content, relevance of content to the company or brand, and search engine ranking
- The top criteria for evaluating a person’s influence in online communities and social networks are participation level, frequency of activity and prominence in the market or community.
- Only about half of the communicators are formally measuring the effects of their social media initiatives
- New metrics are emerging and these criteria could change in the near future
The report has some good case studies including Coca Cola, Quicken Loans, BlendTec and the American Red Cross
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