Measuring Your Brand and Social Media

A recurring question from our clients these days is how to measure the effects of social media on their brand awareness and perception. Social media exposes something that has been largely hidden from marketers: how are consumers talking about your brand. To date, we’ve had to rely on market research to indirectly measure attributes, such as awareness, perception, and preferences. Brand studies and such constructs as Net Promoter add some value, but are indirect measures (not to mention often hugely expensive).

This phenomenon is important for another reason. I have seen some studies that show that Internet referrals generated through social media are already at around 5% and could surpass the traffic from paid search within a few years.  If that is correct, then this channel could surpass Google in its influence on traffic. Of course, I have seen enough rosy forecasts of these sorts over the years to be somewhat skeptical, but there is no doubt that social’s influence will only grow.

Here is a short (and admittedly incomplete) list of companies that are helping measure the social web.

A well-established player is Radian6, which recently announced integration of its platform with WebTrends and Salesforce.com. The integration with Salesforce looks interesting, because it uses Salesforce’s workflow management to create and assign tasks to users. Say, for instance, users on a forum are unhappy about a feature in a product; these conversations can be summarized and assigned to a case, in order to have the problem addressed. Of course, companies will need to be sensitive to not appearing like Big Brother, who is monitoring all conversations. But there are legitimate cases in which reaching out to customers can be a genuine benefit (for an example, see Richard Muller’s recent post).

Infegy’s socialradar is another alternative. Their site emphasizes the size and robustness of their database, which contains several years of history. I think one of the challenges of this medium is the enormous amount of information that is generated, most of which is irrelevant to any one company. Having someone who can not only collect, but sift, categorize and analyze this data will be increasingly important. Socialradar seems to have built a solid offering in this respect.

A newer entry is social-smart, which offers a platform for managing social marketing initiatives. Think of it as being analogous to a “campaign management” application in more traditional database marketing terms. Its measurement capabilities are integrated with the marketing initiatives managed within their application.

Finally, an early-stage company that I was introduced to this week is called SocialFeet (their chairman, Mike Weiksner, is a Fulcrum alum). SocialFeet has a simple plugin that web sites can incorporate; it allows customers to “encourage,” or recommend, products and features. When users opt-in, their recommendation is inserted into the user’s social newsfeed on such sites as Facebook.

I know I’ve left out quite a few companies, a few of which will fall into the “glaring omission” category. Please share any information on your experiences in the comment section (vendors, please spare us the infomercials, but feel free to give a link to your site).

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