IAB UK Social

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Great model Richard. Its a swiss army knife of a measurement model that has uses across the broad universe of social media.

I think my main issue is with regard to its focus on the individiual and that individual’s journey rather than in the community and how it has changed. For me one of the paradigm shifts with social is how it allows us to recognise we are a herd animal and that many of our decisions are based on herd instinct. Can this model be used to describe how a whole community has changed direction?

[...] IAB has recently revealed a framework for measuring the effectiveness of social media activity. At LBi, we’ve already developed our [...]

It’s a fair point Tony. It’s essential any measurement framework allows us to measure changes in community behaviour for the reasons you explain. I actually feel this framework achieves this very well.

The framework isn’t based on measuring individual behaviour but rather the collective behaviour on any given platform. In other words you’re looking at aggregated data for the community engaged with your social media platforms.

So if your intent is specifically to influence or change the behaviour of a particular herd, tribe or commmunity, then this framework encourages you to pick the most pertinent KPIs in line with that objective. So for example, it’s important that you measure how many members of this ‘herd’ get to see your planned social media activity or platform (awareness); how many are actively engaged with it (appreciation); and how many proactively share experiences, views and opinions as a direct result (advocacy).

It would be up to you to define which KPIs fall into those categories depending on the platforms you are using. For example, sentiment analysis may be a important metric to determine whether they are postitively engaged as a result of your activity (appreciation).

In its most simplistic form, if you can measure a shift in sentiment as a result of your activity, as well as an uplift in key advocacy metrics compared to say some historical data then you’re in a good position to say that you’ve met your original objectives successfully.

This is really quite amazing, and a fantastic structure – loving the ‘iab’. Simple is always the best starting point for something like this and you’ve certainly made it easy to understand and put into practice. If I can understand it, anyone can! My only thought about this, is how it’s used in reality, e.g. is it time consuming, does it make sense to ‘the boss’ – which you may have more of an idea of Richard if you’re already using it? One suggestion on top of asking for feedback here is perhaps to ask a few agencies and advertisers to try it in practice for a campaign or two before the full launch to iron out any issues, or to obtain supportive comments. It would definitely be a big step forward for social media if everyone used this framework as standard to help make sense of it all. I can imagine heads/directors becoming familiar with the KPI tables for their various campaigns.

Jack, many thanks for the positive feedback.

I’m hoping that once one becomes familiar with the simple framework it’s relatively easy to apply and not that time consuming. To be honest, most of us are tracking a lot of these KPIs anyway – all this framework does is ensure we’re focusing on the most pertinent KPIs and aggregating them in such a way that tells a bigger and more compelling story for the ‘boss’ to understand.

I think your suggestion to road test this with a few agencies is an excellent one. This is something I’m exploring with other agencies within the Creston Group but I’d definitely welcome other members of the Council or the wider industry putting this framework to the test to help validate this approach or make suggestions on how to make it better.

Hi Richard – Thanks for this: it’s a great model and starting point for us all. We only have one thought to add to that which has already been said. In practice we feel that what’s currently termed ‘advocacy’ could often be categorised as appreciation or action given that both of these typically (but not always) lead to some form of public advocacy in the social media space. Ed

Thanks Ed. I take your point that advocacy could easily be considered an action and is arguably a sign of appreciation too, but for the purposes of this framework I was keen to keep them distinctly separate as WOM is such a key facet of social media.

It’s probably not that clear in the presentation without the VO but on slide 10 I define ACTION as only those KPIs which demonstrate a direct impact on purchase behaviour in some way, e.g. what impact has this activity or platform had on website traffic, call centre enquiries/complaints, handraiser registrations, quotation requests, brochure downloads, sales, purchase frequency or sales value. Likewise, what is the cost per action/quotation/brochure request/sale etc.

These particular actions and metrics are deliberately very specific to the purchase process whereas advocacy in my view is more about how to measure the viral effect of the activity and the degree in which it influences other people’s attitudes and purchase behaviour.

It’s a subtle difference but for that reason I’m inclined to keep them distinctly separate.

Hi Richard, Thanks for that – I see you’re where you’re coming from and how they are separate when Action more directly involves behaviour indicative of purchase. Will be a good analytics challenge to attribute it!

[...] Facebook fan page likes or Twitter followers. Both hard and soft metrics should be measured using a model such as the one developed by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB). This together with a decent [...]

This is an excellent development. It is refreshing to see how Intent (or objectives just to break from your acronym!) is leading the selection of the most relevant KPIs in this framework.

I felt that ‘appreciation’ of the A’s is the most challenging to define. The way you have defined it here is very much based around the immediate response from your social media activities and could miss out on some of the more complex and nuanced conversations that can result from it.

These are the conversations that you might typically track through sentiment monitoring and need KPIs based around brand topics and sub topics to understand. Would this be beyond the intended scope of your framework or would this could through your benchmark component?

Simon,

It’s funny you should mention sentiment analysis as I was initially unsure how to incorporate this into the framework. I ended up making it a discreet component within ‘Appreciation’ as sentiment analysis is effectively a metric for measuring how positive or negative the audience feels towards a given topic. ie it’s a barometer for engagement or appreciation to some degree.
However I admit this does feel a bit of an afterthought and probably doesn’t give it the prominence it deserves!

It’s worth mentioning though that this framework was only designed to measure the efficacy of social media activity. Listening or measuring nuanced conversations feels to me to be a slightly different aspect of measurement. The likes of Nielson’s BuzzMetrics, Radian6, Cymfony or Attentio will have their own frameworks and methodologies to meet certain listening objectives so it probably makes sense to keep these quite separate. The only time when we need to incorporate listening KPIs into this IAB framework is when they help to prove the efficacy of your activity in some way, such as sentiment analysis as mentioned above.

Does that seem a sensible approach to you?

Richard, thanks for the thoughtful presentation.

On slide 8, you avoid listing the single most important KPI any client will sit up and listen to: “Increase Sales.”

It is also one of the most difficult to achieve. The more we cling to engagement, awareness and advocacy (though all valuable to the process) and shy away from linking social media with pure sales metrics, the more difficult it’s going to be for our activities to monetize themselves.

It’s also quite difficult to prove a connection to sales. But it’s one that the broadcast and print industries have insisted they align themselves with for decades.

SM producers need to align with these hard numbers, so senior executives will view our initiatives as being worthy of more than “pilot” sized investment.

[...] case for them. You can find lots of great insight on social media analytics/ROI.  I really like IAB’s Measurement Framework for measuring social media [...]

Thanks for the feedback Stuart. I couldn’t agree with you more. Whilst soft metrics are important we need to somehow get better at measuring the impact on sales otherwise social media will never be taken that seriously. That’s exactly why we’ve included ACTION category to complement AWARENESS, APPRECITATION and ADVOCACY. So lead generation and sales impact metrics would fall under this category. eg enquiries, brochure requests, voucher redemptions, reduction in call centre operational costs, footfall traffic, incremental sales uplift etc.

I’m not saying every social media activity needs to measure these metrics. Again it depends on your INTENT but if lead gen was one of the primary objectives then these are the sorts of things we should be be trying to measure.

But your point raises a far bigger question which is HOW do we measure these sales metrics? I’m afraid the framework doesn’t attempt to answer that question. At this stage we simply wanted to provide a framework to guide brands on the most pertinent metrics to populate.

[...] piece of work that I have seen in this area was completed by members of the IAB in the UK here: https://iabuksocial.co.uk/?p=954.7:44pmView All 0 CommentsCannot add comment at this time. Add [...]