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Tracking Social Media ROIViewing Spectrum Analytics

Marshall Sponder – Webmetricsguru.comnow.seo@gmail.com

@webmetricsguru09/05/2010

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An Introduction to Spectrum Analytics for Social Media ROI

Social Media is a fairly new communications medium and

activity that is often considered to be “free” and available

to everyone. With abundant free and low cost tools and

platforms to create, promote, monitor and analyze social

media content businesses and individuals, excited about

what Social Media can do for them, too often assume that

measurement of Social Media can be taken care of as

more of an afterthought.

In the past estimating Social Media ROI was acceptable,

increasingly that is no longer the case as outlined by

TheBrandBuilder, Oliver Blanchard1. As CMOs and CEOs

have started to seriously consider Social Media as an

effective marketing medium, they also seeking a similar

level of precision in Return on Investment (ROI) metrics

they have gotten from Direct Marketing. Everyone is

attempting to devise a framework for their company’s

Social Media ROI, but the challenge is somewhat different

for each business and industry.

What are the metrics; beyond the basics such as how

many Fans and Followers an account has that can actually

help management manage better? And, of course, what

metrics affect the HOLY GRAIL of business metrics: the

bottom line?

Lately, a lot of attention has been placed of formulas

to calculate Social Media ROI. In fact, earlier this year

Altimeter Group and Web Analytics Demystified shared a

framework for Social Media Metrics and ROI2 addressing

the Marketing Industry Challenge:”I can’t measure social

media ROI.” The metrics were generalized to fit into

a framework, which I analyzed3 in a series of posts at

Webmetricsguru.com. I believe the framework is a step in

the right direction, but much more guidance is needed.

I will even go further by suggesting we avoid talking about

two dimensional formulas in order to calculate Social

Media ROI, even though it is tempting to do so, before

we are able to capture the information to put into those

formulas. While we can reduce a business’s financials to a

series of formulas that calculate profitability or loss, which

is fairly well instrumented by accounting software and

CPA’s and best practices have been for hundreds of years

(for the sake of investment and profitability), it’s much more

difficult to do the same thing for Social Media ROI (which

is only a few years old).

Why I wrote this paper, finding Ultraviolet Data Nuggets and Rainbow Analytics

Over the past year I worked with Cecilia Pineda Feret4

analyzing the web site and social media of the Havana

Central5 restaurant group with a few locations in

Manhattan. We attempted to provide ROI information

to the owner of the group and we regularly discussed

the challenge of tracking our efforts for the company,

the brand and the bottom line. For a small business,

tracking and measuring this involves looking under the

radar and following over the rainbow to find the ROI.

Yet, every business has a different pot of golden data

nuggets (or rainbow pancakes, they’re easier to find!), or

RAINBOW ROI (Cecilia Pineda Feret coined this term in

our discussions about Havana Central ROI tracking and

analytics).

The usual data on the radar are easy to capture:

hits, followers, page views, etc. These metrics are

more diagnostic according to Stratigent’s Jennifer

Veesenmeyer6, allowing you to compare data points

over time, and against competitors, and so on without

necessarily providing any actionable insight into what the

business should change or keep doing. Additional metrics

are also required such as knowing results of efforts which

were the most effective in bringing in sales, expanding the

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customer base, and increasing exposure of the brand.

Acting as an analyst here my insights are usually

connected with data I touch. I reasoned data to prove

Social Media outreach is effective in driving new business

and revenue was available, but we were not able to

capture it. I termed such data as “ultraviolet”, because we

can’t see ultraviolet light, yet it’s present all around us.

I thought about what it takes to capture the information

and tabulate it. When I started this line of thought my goal

was not necessarily to solve Havana Central’s problem

as much as to prove community management was an

effective income generator for any restaurant chain. I

decided to create an approach anyone could use to find

how much data they were missing and what they could do

to enable data capture in preparation for Social Media ROI

based on the need to analyze the full spectrum of data and

initial discussion of the concept can be found on my blog7.

While coming up with this approach we realized Havana

Central really needed a connection from the business and

how it operates to the customer, and back to the business

for tracking via analytics using tactics such as couponing,

secret passwords and perks for VIPs, etc.

Read on to find out more about the methodology.

Setting Measurement Goals

Every business falls into some type of category. In order

to know what is realistic to strive for in relation to Social

Media, it helps to know what the average traffic is and

sites for the category you business is in.

For restaurants, on average 5% of referral traffic to top

restaurants comes from Facebook, 0.16% from Twitter and

.27% comes from MySpace.com according to Compete’s

Referral Analytics Traffic Dashboard for the Entertainment

Guide: Restaurant and Dining Category. (a new offering of

Compete I provided suggestions about early on).

Figure 1 – Compete PRO Referral Analytics Traffic

Dashboard, July 2010 for Industry Category: Entertainment

Guide: Restaurants and Dining8

Havana Central’s Referral traffic as detailed by Compete.

com shows no traffic at all from Social Networks (low

sample site) and so a marketing goal ought to include

meeting or surpassing the average referral traffic from

Social Networks for the relevant category – in this case,

several hundred more visits per month from Facebook

alone would be called for (note: Google Analytics shows

some Facebook and Twitter traffic to havanacentral.com).

Similar diagnostics can be obtained from Google Analytics

Benchmarking (when sharing data with Google) based on

business type. The charts below show that on average,

Havana Central gets 3.75 times more visits than the

average restaurant using Google Analytics but the average

restaurant is generating more pageviews per visit (it may

have more to do, in this case, with PDF menus that are

downloaded but not counted as pageviews or otherwise

tracked by Google Analytics unless virtual pageviews are

created for each menu).

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Figure 2 – Google Analytics Benchmarking of

Havanacentral.com vs. all other restaurant sites in

Google’s database.

Using benchmarking tools like Compete, Quantcast,

Comscore, Nielsen, Alexa and in this respect, Google

Analytics, is useful in order to formulate some business

goals (which can also turn into measurement goals),

especially those connected to Social Media, but they

are not a replacement for direct measurement using site

analytics.

In fact, Web Analytics data and Compete.com data almost

never match as the methods to obtain the information in

both cases are different which accounts for the disparity

in numbers of unique visitors, visits, pageviews, etc. In my

discussions with Compete, they have also pointed out their

tools are meant to complement, not replace site analytics.

It’s also notable Comscore, Compete and Quantcast allow

JavaScript tags to be added to your website which allow

more accurate measurements for you business (but not

necessarily your competitors unless they are also adding

JavaScript tags to their sites).

Missing Measurement Standards

The Web Analytics Association released Web Analytics

Standards9 a few years back and there have been similar

attempts by the Internet Advertising Bureau for Banner

Advertising, Social Ads and Video Ads. Setting up

standards may be a necessary step before widespread

monetization can take place. In fact, an article I wrote

for VentureBeat /SocialBeat last year10 suggested Video

publishers had the IAB’s VAST standard to thank for rapid

monetization of video ads that started taking place; I quote

from my article here:

… Monetizing online video has been somewhat

problematic because the technology in place interfered

with easy communications between publishers and

third party video ad platforms.

But that’s beginning to change, partly due to the IAB

(Internet Advertising Bureau), via the VAST Standard.

According to the IAB, VAST (Video Ad Serving

Template) includes a standard XML-based ad response

for in-stream video and an XML Schema Definition

(“XSD”) for developers. It’s meant to accommodate the

majority of current practices within the online digital

video advertising business. The gains we‘re seeing

now were almost impossible to achieve until the VAST

Standard, which made it easier to obtain end-to-end

control between ad servers and associated video

players (said CEO Tod Sacerdoti)

Because we lack standard definitions for influence,

conversations, engagement and conversions, to name

a few, it’s so very much harder to reach an interoperable

place where all the platforms that need to talk to each

other, can, in a meaningful way.

My work at the Web Analytics Association as Board

Director in 2007-2009 led to creating and leading the

Social Media Committee (now-defunct)11; it showed me

the industry lacked consensus on social media standards

and many of the players I talked to at the time liked it that

way (standards may be seen by some as a way to stifle

innovation). I don’t know if that’s still true.

On the other hand, for Social Media to “grow up”

Standards definitions may be needed; I for one, believe

they are very needed and important work is being done

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in the UK to achieve those standards through the CIPR

(Certified Institute of Public Relations) Social Media

Monitoring study group and panel12, of which I’m an

honorary member. I hope readers will follow CIPR-CP

leader Philip Sheldrake13 quest to come up with standards

for Influence.

In this paper the lack of standards could mean any

measures a company comes up with to measure its own

social media efforts (hopefully after aligning their business

and measurement goals and strategies) will be difficult to

apply universally, outside the context a specific business

that came up with their own measures.

That is OK for the short term, but in the longer term, we

need consensus on what we measure and how to put

that measurement in place. Once we have that, Rainbow

Analytics will be much easier to achieve.

Aligning Business Processes to Measurement Goals

A common challenge for Social Media Measurement and

the biggest roadblock finding the data nuggets under the

radar and over the rainbow are business processes that

are unaligned with a business’s goals for measurement.

One example, obtaining Requests for a Quote (for a

potential catering) which corresponds to a page on the

Havana Central site (monitored by Google Analytics on

one side and back end email request on the other) typically

require communications between a marketing assistant

and community manager (communications didn’t happen

often enough or were too difficult to maintain).

Catering jobs generate several thousand dollars of income,

per job, to the bottom line, but the business process

wasn’t yet aligned to the measurement goal (attribution of

a referral to outreach). One solution is to have the same

person do Community Outreach, Management and track

catering orders in a spreadsheet that could work for a very

small operation that can live with a manual process but

quickly becomes un-scalable.

It also brings up another issue; at what point does

tracking and monitoring roles interfere with going out and

generating business? Marketing tasks are often assigned

to different people/groups for reason; unless those people

are the same page in every respect that matters how well

can we expect them to communicate, or even agree on

what needs to be done, needs to be tracked and how?

The communications process is often too taxing for many

SMB’s and it’s difficult even for large corporations but

larger businesses are usually willing to make strategic

investments in messaging technology, business and social

media measurement processes while SMB’s, often just

trying to survive in difficult economic times, cannot or

are unwilling to try. It might seem that communications

problems (such as two individuals being on the same

page) would be easy to solve, but it’s usually not the case.

Another example from my experience working with Havana

Central was creating and fine tuning Radian6 Alerts in

order to know when customers were in a location and

offering them a drink14 (or a coupon, which was never set

up). I saw the potential here but got frustrated with the

results.

You can’t blame it on software, automation (Radian6,

FourSquare and Facebook Places to name a few) took

care of knowing people are in a venue by sending us email

alerts (a measurement goal for Social Media attribution);

but the business goal of Brand Awareness and Customer

Loyalty (which are much harder to align and scorecard)

was not aligned with the measurement strategy I came up

with (getting management to be on the same page with

business and measurement strategies is the subject of

several books onto itself and I’m not going over it here).

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Testing this approach in the real world of a NYC restaurant

chain we found no systems in place yet to incentive very

busy struggling restaurant managers, waiters and waitress

(who need to be trained and often change jobs) to gather

the information (a customer is in a location, greet them and

offer a coupon) and record it in such a way that it can be

attributed to Social Media and then tabulate into an ROI

metric. Specific middleware to record the transactions was

also missing.

This lack of alignment is the biggest problem we have as

the tools are in place to measure most of what we need

already and plenty of people have come up with measures

for Social Media ROI, but there’s almost succeeding in

defining and aligning the social media dimension of your

business goals to your overall measurement goals leading

to the common result of Social Media ROI that cannot

be accurately defined or measured (but is sometimes

estimated); several people are working on this problem

right now but no one I know of has solved it.

Everyone reading this paper can likely attest to many

instances of the very same alignment issues in their own

organizations, once you step back and think about it.

There may be several valid reasons why your business

strategies aren’t aligned with measurement strategies; for

example, when I worked at IBM.com (2003-2008) we were

usually unable to track marketing and search optimization

activities all the way down the sales channel.

Part of the problem was traced back to technology

(accounting systems that don’t speak to each other),

another part were was sheer volume of activities and

people (finding the right people in each part of IBM to talk

to each other was problem) but the biggest issue did not

turn out to be technology, as much as it was business

processes for sales organization appeared to be different,

and in conflict, with the measurement goals of the dotcom

(IBM.com operates as a separate business unit from the

rest of the organization). At least, that’s how it looked to

me.

Each part of an organization has its own goals and

methodologies to serve its own purposes and to get work

done; weather those purposes support or interfere with

accurate measurement is up for you, the reader, to decide.

In fact, just about every business unit, every company,

every corporation, every city, state and every country

have the same exact communication issues around goals

and strategies, and as we have seen throughout our

civilization’s history, this is not an easy problem to solve.

Maybe the best way to look at our differences as stepping

stone to better way of communication that serve us all

(once there is enough consensus and people in place at

the top that can focus business and measurement goals,

strategies and policies).

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Figure 3 – Radian6 charts showing Social Media Buzz

Measurement of Havana Central Times Square location

vs. neighboring restaurants Blue Fin, Heartland Brewery,

Carmine’s Times Square, and Bond 45. The chart on the

right shows the number of twitter followers of those who

tweeted about each restaurant in the last 3 months and

where they are located by region. Note: this chart shows

aspects of Brand Awareness for the 5 restaurants surveyed

here.

Finding the right middleware to record results

This lack of alignment is the biggest problem we have

as the tools are in place to measure most of what we

need already and plenty of people have come up with

measures for Social Media ROI, but there’s almost

no one succeeding in defining and aligning the social

media dimension of your business goals to your overall

measurement goals leading to a common result of Social

Media ROI that cannot be accurately defined or measured

(but is sometimes estimated); several people are working

on this problem right now but no one I know of has solved

it.

Figure 4 – part of the authors’ visualization of a Radian6

date export of visits by Twitter Accounts to any Havana

Central location from June 09-June 10 (anyone checking in

via FourSquare, or tweeting they were eating at one of the

locations), see http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/

social-media-case-study-havana-central/ for more details.

Why Social CRM is needed

Over the last year Social CRM has quickly evolved as

means to connect Social Media Chatter to existing records

in Salesforce and other CRMs. This space is quickly

becoming one of the hot topics in Social Media Monitoring

and will be subject of a future paper by the author.

Closing the Gap and Finding the Rainbow

Data can be collected from Social Media Monitoring

platforms like Radian6 easily enough, but connecting a

visitor (a social media awareness goal & a measurement

goal) with increased sales by restaurant location generated

from social media customers as a result of social media

outreach (a business goal) takes a level of middleware

(Social CRM, covered in the previous section) plus more

buy in and patience from management (it’s often a hard

combination to come by).

Also needed is a way of connecting monitoring platforms

such as Radian6 and the backend check receipts; today is

only being envisioned and no one that I know of has done

it yet. While this paper focuses on restaurants with its

focus on location, check-ins, cash receipts, catering and

reviews, the same process can be applied to any business

with slight modifications.

Barcode / QR code readers, RFID and Geo-fencing are

expected to close the gap for restaurant venues in the next

two years but the software to connect all this data must be

CRM aware and I expect the role of community manager

will evolve into Relationship Management within the

next 18 months. Acquisitions by Scout Labs by Lithium

Technologies, Radian6 partnerships with Salesforce and

recent enhancements by Alterian around the SM2 platform

are just the beginning of the tip of the data iceberg lying

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under the surface, just waiting to be tapped.

Getting Started by Performing a Social Enablement Audit

The only way to know how much precious data your

business has in the unseen spectrum is to audit your

data. Specifically, list all the sources of data your business

has and what campaigns and marketing initiatives your

business is running. This table shows data from Havana

Central.

Figure 5 – Social Enablement Audit of Havana Central

I put all the data sources vertically and all the campaigns,

including website promos and pages horizontally. Note, the

x- and y-axis could be reversed easily.

By conducting an audit of all the available data sources

within in the context of all the known marketing campaigns

and initiatives, we learn what information we have, where

to find it, what format it is in and the level of difficulty

in overlaying data in order to create Social Media ROI

metrics we need.

In this example, data validating community management

shows up partly in Google Analytics and Radian6, but

will fail to appear anywhere else. It is next to impossible

without a guaranteed tie into a revamped business process

to track the actual dollar value to the outreach being done

in behalf of the business, though one could estimate it (for

example, each tweet about eating at the restaurant can

be estimated to be worth over $100 based on the average

order size, the average party size and the average price of

a meal).

Estimating Social Media ROI is useful when you make a

decision to expand or retract a marketing initiative but is

not a replacement for actual ROI measures that are tied to

a transaction.

In another case, traffic and possible marketing efforts

directed at the VIP page of the Havana Central restaurant

site15 can be expected to appear in Google Analytics and

Google Adwords (when ads are run) but not anywhere else.

Figure 6 – How enabled are we for Social Media ROI?

Most data is collected in Silos16, it’s pretty much always

been that way and is getting worse according to Robert

Scoble17. Applications are designed to provide specific

functionality and data are collected around it, but usually

applications aren’t designed to integrate with anything else

– in this case, we don’t expect a reservation site such as

Opentable, handling most restaurant reservations to have

data on Community Management outreach of the VIP page

of a website.

For Social Media ROI calculations that are tied to an actual

transaction that takes place at the restaurant or its online

site we need a logical way to overlay data, using what is

commonly called a common key18, that currently doesn’t

exist in this business context. Figure 6 suggests, based on

the Enablement Audit that 82% of the data is “ultraviolet”

or invisible (or, not able to be combined because a

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common key does not exist).

One approach used by large corporations is to overlay

data into Data Cubes or data warehouse where all the

data you have can be imported into a Cube19, but usually

the resources to pull something like this together are

beyond reach of most businesses, including those who

want measure ROI the most, small businesses and even

PR Companies doing social media programs as part of

Public Relations and Marketing (in behalf of their clients).

Brick and mortar SMBs who could not possibly conceive,

afford or execute such a data cube even though they may

actually require one, but once your data is in the Cube you

can perform analysis that could uncover ROI and customer

behavior that is not ordinarily visible.

Figure 7 – slices of a data cube

Given the lack of the needed common key (in this case,

a common record locator for every record in Google

Analytics, Opentable, SeemlessWeb, Email Marketing, etc)

in many data sources – information needed to populate the

data cube is going to be spotty, noisy and in other cases

hard to translate it to the right structure to be effective.

According to Gary Angel, the CTO of Semphonic, when

you integrate data into a data warehouse, you open up

new questions, targeting opportunities, and analysis

methods that otherwise doesn’t exist19.

Figure 8 – Data Coverage

In the process of doing a Social Enablement Audit you

might find that you are not collecting all the data you

needed; in this case you may not have some data that you

need in any form and in any data source. The best way

to find out if you missing collecting data is to compare

your data sources to each other. As you examine your

data you may find there are some things you want to

know that no application is tracking at all and this will

drive new solutions for your business. What we’re trying

to find out here is how compatible is the data being used

to run your business to each other and how easy is it

to integrate information. Typically, applications are not

created to integrate and the data within each source and

are frequently incompatible with each other.

One attempt to answer the compatibility problem was

Adobe (formally Omniture) Open Business Analytics

Platform20 using Web Analytics as central point to unify

disparate applications such as Radian6 (one of our data

sources), several different Content Management Systems,

Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and

even Opentable, using Omniture for their own marketing

analysis, (using Test and Target) within Site Catalyst, but

all of these require a lot of money and time that do not

make sense to implement for most small business (not

until someone comes up with a suite of tools for low end of

the market that makes data integrations much easier and

inexpensive).

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Supposing you could integrate all the data you need into

a cube, would the resulting reports lead to insights not

ordinarily obtainable? I think so, but it will depend on how

well business processes are translated in to the matching

reports via a clearly defined measurement strategy,

mentioned earlier, and gifted analysts needed to make

sure they do. Hopefully, business will also learn how to

listen to what the analysts have to say when they are able

to come up with marketing insights and give them a seat

at the table which they traditionally haven’t had in most

organizations.

I believe it’s time to consider doing similar enablement

for Social Media that we more typically perform for Web

Analytics (with extensive page tagging often required to

pick up specific customer behavior, often a measurement

goal).

Figure 9 – Stages of Web Analytics Evolution from Judah

Phillips deck on Webanalytics congress the Netherlands,

Amsterdam June 2nd 2010, slide 1421.

In the beginning of Web Analytics circa early 1990’s basic

diagnostic data is all that could be collected and today,

many businesses are capable of tracking much more than

this (with proper enablement) but settle for using the basic

gauges of visitors, visits, pageviews though little insight

into business can be obtained this way.

At the turn of the century analytics improved and business

could use the data to analyze their sites, but most

businesses didn’t know how to define their business goals

and translate them into measurement goals and align their

organizations so that real analysis could happen with the

result good analysis was done, but rarely.

Around 2005 things got to be more interesting with a

convergence of sorts including Flash and Ajax tracking

evolving, but again, most organizations aren’t yet able,

willing or think it’s too expensive to translate what they do

and what they want to track into what these tools can do

and what they can track, and as a result much data and

insight is lost.

As social media began as grassroots, peer to peer

expression of communications between friends and fans,

etc, this kind of integration had not lent itself to being

instrumented in the same way Site Analytics evolved but

it’s only a matter of time until it does get instrumented,

much as Web Analytics has. As corporations are going

more social, so are SMB’s. Parallels between Social Media

Measurement and Web Analytics suggest convergence

and the possibility of actual ROI measurement once

business goals are merged with right measurement goals.

With geo-location coming into the mix and checking in

quickly becoming the universal currency, it may become

easier to integrate social media with the rest of the data

sources – and the cost and complexity will decrease on

the low end, making possible for SMB’s to have a plug

and play solution within the next two years. However,

translating your business process, connecting the Data

Rainbow back to measurement will be required even in

streamlined solutions, leaving room for a lot of creativity.

Finding Data Nuggets of Gold under Data Rainbow

It’s my belief we do not achieve actual Social Media ROI

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unless we can segment social media activity and associate

it across data sources and marketing channels back to

actual revenue. In fact, most business and consultancies

have no idea how to start, which is why it doesn’t happen

often, if it does at all.

Figure 10, Example of a Data Rainbow

Only a fraction of the data we need to collect to track

Social Media ROI is actually being saved (or seen) in a

way that can be analyzed and connect to Social Media

Marketing initiatives. The chart above shows some of the

individual silos of data for Havana Central (the different

data sources above might can be termed silos for the

purpose of this paper).

Looking at the Data in our Silos for data nuggets (or rainbow

pancakes!)

In order to know what can and can’t be combined to

form Social Media ROI we need to look at the data we’re

collecting in greater detail – assessing what we actually

have to work with.

Figure 11 – A Opentable Report

An Opentable report as it is currently generated is almost

impossible to attribute to Social Media outreach there’s

no common key to associate with a visitor from Facebook

(unless the application tracks that). Opentable tracks

website visitors that came from Havana Central, but there’s

no way to count how much of it was Social Media related

in the reports they provide to business owners.

The same problem arises with Grubhub, a popular

Restaurant Search utility.

Figure 12 – A Grubhub report

The Grubhub report has no common key except a date,

everything else is tied back to internal databases that are

not accessible (i.e.: ID number), no easy way to tie back to

Google Analytics (unless we can put tracking code into a

Grubhub instance, which is really hard to do for third party

applications like Grubhub and Opentable).

pg 11

Radian6 reports that monitor Buzz around the restaurant

do offer possibilities to tracking what website visitors do

on your website through its integration with WebTrends

and in your business location via Salesforce.com but

few businesses have adopted those integrations to my

knowledge.

As these Social Media targeted integrations exist at all

but are rarely adopted, suggest businesses are too often

unaware of the choices they have before them when

they formulate their business goals and measurement

strategies and often choose unwisely or fail to choose

at all. In any case, while your Social Media campaigns

might be driving a certain level activity which should be

measureable, that same activity is invisible to the reports

you can currently pull from Opentable and Grubhub,

Google Analytics, Facebook and even Radian6 without

deliberate measurement enablement and the alignment of

your measurement strategy with you business strategy.

Comparing data dimensions and combining them in the Data Rainbow

Figure 13 – Data Dimensions comparison

In the chart above I highlighted in green dimensions from

different data sources that might be able to be combined

to get that Rainbow view and insights derived. We know

by now the vast majority of data being collected cannot be

combined based on the example above. While your data

will too often be missing that common key that can be

used to link all the transactions together it’s still possible to

fill the gaps with third party applications and ingenuity.

Finding Solutions to Bridge the Gaps

Figure 14 – Measurement Solutions by Campaign or

Marketing Initiative

Taking a closer look at a specific marketing initiative

against the sources of data available can drive solutions

where missing data can be added in when it’s missing.

Look at your campaigns and marketing. Figure out how

to add the additional enablement that would allow you to

track the Social Media ROI of a particular activity such

as somebody downloading a menu if they came from

Facebook or Twitter.

Bridging the Data Gap Example – Connecting Facebook and Opentable for Data Nuggets

Figure 15 – Finding ways to connect Opentable with

Facebook

You may need to develop or find 3rd party applications

capable of bridging the gaps found using this audit

process. While we can enable Google Analytics/FB

connection –we still need a Content Management System

pg 12

that connects a website, Google Analytics and Opentable

and Google Analytics can act as a go between.

BTW, in the process of detailing needed capabilities our

audit concludes the best enablement would be rebuilding

that website (ouch!) with a CMS (SiteWrench CMS) that

can handle Opentable & Google Analytics integration22.

Conclusions:

1) “States of Readiness” for Social Media ROI Analytics

implementation are very similar to those for Web Analytics,

where there are various levels of participation using the

tools currently available. For example, Radian6, Salesforce

CRM and WebTrends integrate but most businesses are

not ready to take advantage of it yet. Once business

moves from past collecting basic diagnostic data, they

can begin to merge their business strategy and goals

with specific measurement strategies and goals and the

measurement of Real Social Media ROI can begin.

2) Most businesses, esp. SMB’s are not yet ready to fully

implement the data audit methodology. Someone needs

to come along and make the process easier for them, and

more streamlined, before this is going to happen on an

SMB level. I suspect a streamlined implementation of data

audits will differ somewhat based on business verticals.

However, within each vertical there will be enough

similarities to standardize and streamline (i.e.; most

restaurants use Opentable and SeemlessWeb and should

be part of the solution for this vertical, but perhaps not

for other types of retail establishments like Supermarkets,

clothing outlets, Travel Sites, Hotels, etc, which will need

different sets of data feeds and metrics).

3) Depending on an actual SMBs’ goals, what you are

measuring may be different for another SMB, even in the

same or another industry. The challenge here is to capture

the data that is not immediately seen or considered and

relatable back to a Social Media effort by linking your

measurement strategy and goals with your business

strategy and goals.

4) To capture this data, we need to perform a complete

audit of efforts made. It may be a time consuming task

depending on the size and complexity of the business, but

for the moment remains the best way to fully consider and

fully integrate efforts across multiple platforms.

5) The best place to integrate all the data sources for

your business is within the analytics platforms such as

Google Analytics, Adobe Site Catalyst (formerly known as

Omniture) though other solutions such as Spredfast are

available.

6) You need to work with your web developers,

programmers, product and sales teams to enable tracking

of certain actions to ensure that your efforts are being

tracked and what meaning you assign to them other than

just collecting them on a periodic basis like many continue

to do.

pg 13

What you’ll find at the end of the Data Rainbow …… Yum!

(Amanda - http://iammommy.typepad.com/my_

weblog/2009/10/rainbow-pancake-sugar-cookies-winnie-

the-pooh.html)

Links

1. http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/how-

to-not-calculate-social-media-r-o-i/ Oliver Blanchard has

written several posts and a popular SlideShare presenting

his views on what is and is not Social Media ROI.

2. Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics (Altimeter

Group & Web Analytics Demystified) see http://www.web-

strategist.com/blog/2010/04/22/altimeter-report-social-

marketing-analytics-with-web-analytics-demystified/

3. http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/social-

marketing-analytics/ - there are actually 8 posts I wrote on

the subject, not all show up with this URL.

4. http://www.linkedin.com/in/ceciliapinedaferet Cecilia

Pineda Feret’s LinkedIn page.

5. http://www.havanacentral.com Havana Central Website

6. http://www.stratigent.com/news-and-events/pimp_

your_reports/default.html Stratigent’s Pimp Your Reports

program which I recently attended

7. http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/08/

on-360-degree-analytics/ - put forward that most of the

interesting data that proves Social Media is working is

invisible to the naked eye – or “ultraviolet”. However, with

the right devices and mythology the data can be seen and

quantified

8. http://www.compete.com/referrals/referrals/

category/3037/?threshold=1

9. http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/resource/

resmgr/PDF_standards/WebAnalyticsDefinitions.pdf

10. http://social.venturebeat.com/2009/11/29/brightroll-

says-video-ad-profits-are-soaring/

11. http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/?c_

reorganization

12. http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/cipr-social-media-

measurement-group-launches

13. Phillip Sheldrake on Twitter @sheldrake

14. http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/social-

media-case-study-havana-central/ The author was often

frustrated why we could not go further here.

15. http://havanacentral.com/vip.php

16. http://management.about.com/od/businessstrategy/a/

pg 14

DataInteg02.htm

17. http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/03/location-2012/

Robert Scoble argues massive amounts of Geo-Location

data is being collected in Silos when it would be better for

consumers the data was shared across all vendors.

18. http://analyticsinsightblog.stratigent.com/2010/09/

centralize-your-data-using-adobe.html The article

suggests Web Analytics platform Site Catalyst is one place

where it’s possible to pull together data from disparate

sources into actionable dashboards and reports.

19. http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2010/06/

further-thoughts-on-data-warehousing.html - Gary Angel

suggest 3 dimensional arrays open up new questions,

targeting opportunities, and analysis methods that

otherwise don’t exist.

20. http://www.omniture.com/en/products/open_

business_analytics_platform Adobe Omniture Open

Business Analytics Platform.

21. http://www.slideshare.net/webanalisten/webanalytics-

congress-the-netherlands-amsterdam-june-2nd-2010-

judah-phillips

22. SiteWrench CMS – this CMS seems to have it all.