Commonsense Social Media Measurement Part 2: Setting SMART Objectives

When designing a social media measurement program, one needs to start with a basic understanding of measurement as a discipline. The first step of measurement is always setting objectives. Having served on countless committees and read hundreds of award entries for campaigns, this is the step where a lion’s share of communication programs (social media or not) fail to perform. It is also where the award-winning campaigns shine over their would-be challengers. They always have well defined objectives, and as a result, well-defined results.

Setting objectives is easier if you know what they need to contain. A good place to start is to look at it through the management lens, since that approach will be the most likely help you get the support you need from the bean counters. The SMART method of setting objectives, which was published in “Management Review” as early as 1981 by George Doran calls for specific, measureable, attainable, relevant and time bound objectives. In other words you need to specify in your objective “how many, by when.”

SMART Objectives

Source: Wikipedia

For example, if you were running a social media campaign to support an event, you might write this objective:

“By three months before the event, we will confirm at least 20 online influencers to attend the event, with half of those blogging or otherwise creating content about the event.”

The “how many” being “20 online influencers” and the “by when” being three months before the event. The objective is specific in its scope, will allow us to see if we are meeting the expected result, is attainable given the time and scope, and is relevant to what we are trying to do, which is to get online buzz started about the event since our objective is to get at least half of them to create content about the event. This is a relational objective versus one that will measure sales or a Return on Investment (ROI).

I could also look to measure ROI. Perhaps there are a number of participants that you need to attend your conference to make it profitable. Let’s say in this case, that number would be 400 paying participants at the early bird rate. Let’s say that historically, at three months before the conference, you usually have 200 people registered, 300 at two months out and 400 in the month leading up to the conference. Perhaps you give a special discount code to the online influencers you have invited to your conference that they can give to their followers.

“By two months prior to the event, over 100 people will have registered using the ‘friends of online influencer code and we will be 15 percent ahead of usual registration numbers.”

Let’s say that tickets for the conference through the online influencer code is $150, if you multiply by 100 tickets, this is $15,000. To truly calculate ROI, you need to then subtract the cost for getting those ticket sales. So let’s say you spent $1,000 in staff time and outreach to get those influencers involved, so you net $14,000.

Moreover, there is a halo effect from the participation of the influencers. While they may not bring in sales directly, their name recognition might inspire some of your other participants to register. Other measures you might consider would be the overall registration pace with online influencers in the mix, versus a previous year when you didn’t use this tactic. You might also use a special hashtag (a hashtag looks like this: #event) that online influencers could use in their 140-character Twitter messages and measure the spread of the hashtag about the conference as driven by influencers and compare them to the pace of registrations in that period.

There are many ways we could design the interaction, but knowing what we need to accomplish would go a long way toward giving us a roadmap. Objectives help us start from the end and work our way back. In many ways, knowing where you want to end up can help to set the overall strategy and tactics to get there. In other words, objectives help you to define and articulate what you need to succeed and help you to know if you got there.

Do you set measureable objectives for your social media interaction? If so, what do you measure. Would love more case studies, and if you have a good one it might be used in the book.

Here are all the posts from the Commonsense Social Media Measurement series:

• Part I: A Commonsense Approach to Social Media Measurement
• Part 2: Setting SMART Objectives
• Part 3: Measurement as a Diagnostic Tool
• Part 4: The 3 As of Social Media Measurement
• Part 5: What Is Your Measurement Personality Style?

The above is draft material for a chapter on measurement that Geoff Livingston kindly asked me to write in his new book, Welcome to the Fifth Estate (the follow up to Now Is Gone, which is almost out of print). Comments may be used in the final edition. You can download the first drafted chapter of his new edition — Welcome to the Fifth Estate — for free.