This post comes as a celebration of the one year anniversary of #LeadershipChat  – the gathering hosted by Lisa Petrilli and Steve Woodruff that happens on Twitter each week on Tuesdays – and one that I’ve been honored to be a part of for the entire year.

So – back in 1997 – the amazing book The Leadership Engine was published.  If you haven’t read it – it’s still amazingly relevant today.   In a Fast Company article back in 1998, the author of that book Noel M. Tichy said something that sticks with me to this day (I have the article printed out and filed away).   He said:

“leadership is about change.  It’s about taking people from where they are now to where they need to be.  The best way to get people to venture into unknown terrain is to make it desirable by taking them there in their imaginations.”

The Tuscan Table Of LeadershipChat

For the last year, I’ve been privileged to hear and participate in the storytelling around the “Tuscan table” of Leadership Chat.   There have been:

Stories about:

• Creating leadership in a virtual environment.  Where there was a lively discussion and stories from Ann Handley about how she has worked virtually with a team and created the success that MarketingProfs enjoys.
• Some “enchanted” evening.  Which was a wonderful set of stories from Guy Kawasaki – and how he works on enchanting customers.
• A true balance of head and heart – discussing Military Leadership with author Wally Bock.
• Discussing and sharing stories of “killing giants” with guest author Stephen Denny.  What an inspirational evening that turned out to be.
• Sharing stories of failure – yes failure with Les McKeown and how we can learn from it and become better for it.

All of the gatherings have been wonderful – and the stories shared from the profound to the mundane (like the running joke of cannoli and beverages of choice) make for evenings I don’t like to miss.

And certainly for anyone who feels overwhelmed, challenged or in any way inadequate of true leadership – the gathering that Lisa and Steve provide is the true manifestation of Noel Tichy said in that Fast Company article.  Leadership chat is an approachable way to get us to venture into the unknown.  It feeds the imagination – and really helps us all to tell our stories.

I look forward to another year of telling tales around the Tuscan table.

These days, when I speak at conferences, or visit with clients – there’s one question I get more than any other:  How can I measure my Social Media efforts? Or, similarly, “How do I know Social Media is worth the effort?”   I’m not alone.   Do a Google Search for “social media measurement” (with the quotes) and you’ll get more than 460,000 results.  But the most interesting thing about that search is the ads.   Of the 11 Google ads (during my search yesterday) eight of them were for “sentiment analysis”, two of them were for basic “listening” tools and one of them wasn’t relevant at all (some online degree thing).

See, the reason that we’re struggling to find an answer to the question of “how we measure social media” is not because the answer is hard.  It’s because it’s the wrong question.

Social Media Isn’t Media

We’ve known for years that Social Media isn’t really media.  It doesn’t have “inventory” and it’s not meant to deliver “ads” like traditional “media”.   As far back as 2008 one of my marketing heroes Jeffrey Eisenberg was saying Social Media Is Not Media.    But for some reason we’re refusing to change the word.

Lately, when someone asks me the question about the measurement of their social media efforts – I talk about how it’s a brand new muscle that our businesses need to develop – and strengthen.   And if we do it well – we make the entire organization healthier.    Or, I’ll say “developing the social web strategy is like butter.  By itself it doesn’t taste very good – but it makes everything else we do as marketers taste better.

And, while they’re both true – both answers are really a cop-out.  They are highly unsatisfying to someone who’s trying to build a business case to spend valuable time and money on a Social Web strategy.

Trying to apply a measurement strategy to the Social Web (see how I’ve changed it mid-blog post) is like trying to ask “what’s the ROI measurement on word of mouth?”  Or, it’s like asking – “what’s the ROI measurement on the telephone system in your business?”    All of these – word of mouth, the telephone system and the social web are platforms by which we share content, and more importantly conversation.

The difference between the Social Web and traditional “media” is that it is NOT a platform for the delivery of an ad or even content.  It’s the platform for a discussion.

Now, to be fair, that discussion may start with the placement of content – or even an advertisement.  The latter, of course, is how you usually get into trouble (as Honda found out the hard way) – but nevertheless a discussion may start.  In short, you can walk into a party and have the first thing out of your mouth be “$5 coupon if you act quickly”.  But the conversion rate is likely to suck pretty extensively.

Measure Content & Conversation

So, how can I get a more satisfying answer to the question?    Well here’s a thought.  Think about your other marketing tactics a moment.   You might be running TV Ads, or Print Ads, Pay-Per-Click Ads on Search Engines, E-mail Campaigns or even Banner Ads.   What’s the ROI on those tactics?   I suspect the majority of you have pretty good answers for that.  If you don’t – well that’s another blog post.

But assuming you do – you most likely measure the campaigns themselves.    And your measurement isn’t whether a particular platform is worthy – it’s whether it’s worthy via the campaign that you’re running and what you’re trying to achieve.  In other words – there are two viable conclusions you can come to if/when you fail at one of those tactics.  Either your creative content was wrong or didn’t resonate (didn’t get the conversions that others got) or the tactic is just too expensive on a cost per-lead-basis for your particular strategy (e.g. you won’t see any Big Blue Moose Superbowl Ads any time soon).   In both cases, we admit that it’s not the platform’s fault.  After all it works somewhere for someone.   We just didn’t put forward the right content – or our goal for that tactic is misaligned.

So where does that leave us?

Well – I suggest you look at the Social Web in the same manner.  To address the first goal – I’d first ask you “what’s your goal with the Social Web?”  Are you trying to drive more leads, or awareness at the top of your sales funnel – or are you trying to stem customer service costs?  Or, are you trying to do all of the above?    Then, I’d ask that you measure the ROI of reaching that goal per the creative conversation and content that you produce to try and reach that goal.

In other words – let’s assume for the moment that our goal for our initial Social Web strategy is to “drive more prospects into our online store”.   In order to do that, we’re going to put together some GREAT free content and conversation to build interest.  That content is going to cost us X dollars to create – and it’s going to cost us Y dollars to distribute through the Social Web.  As we start to try and build a community around that content and that conversation – we should watch our store?  If we start getting more people to come in – that’s measurable.  But to be clear – that doesn’t mean that the Social Web is providing return.  It means our one, GREAT piece of content is providing return.  And our ability to spread it via the Social Web is the telephone system, it is our Word Of Mouth or our “platform” for getting it out there.

And Now, Those Listening Tools Make Sense

When we start looking at it that way – all those “listening”, “sentiment analysis” and measurement tools within Facebook  “likes” and “engagement” and all the rest start to really make sense.  Because now we’re not looking at the Social Web as a graph that must continually go up and to the right.  We save those for the content and conversations we’re having.    We’re rather looking at it like we do our Telephone System or Word Of Mouth.  The platform is an important way that we have to expand our business.  But it’s only as good as we are skilled at any time using it.

And that’s what we should be measuring.

Last week SalesForce.com instantly validated the quite immature Social Media Metrics market when it announced its acquisition of Radian6 – the social media monitoring platform.   This was the largest of several recent acquisitions – namely Lithium’s acquisition of ScoutLabs and MarketWire’s acquisition of Sysomos.   And, what it signals is that – ready or not – measuring Social Media efforts with an analytics tool is coming front and center to your world.

Hit Me Baby One More Time

Remember Hits?   How many Hits did you get?  I got a bunch of Hits.  Before Web analytics really got going in the late 90′s – there was the Hit counter – the little odometers that would sit at the bottom of pages and measure how many “Hits” you got to your site.  But those, of course, weren’t sufficient for any real business – and as the importance of the Web started to grow in the enterprise, so too came the onslaught of  Web traffic measurement software.

There were many to choose from initially.  Anybody remember Analog?  Or AWStats?  Or WebAlyzer?  Oh, how about NetGenesis? It was great.  But then, as marketers were pressured to get “serious” about Web measurement – the market started to consolidate around a few solutions.  And, it’s good to remember just how deathly afraid some of us were to switch Web Analytics vendors.

Believe it or not, all those tools didn’t measure traffic in the same way.  And remember, Google Analytics didn’t even exist (unless you count Urchin the solution it acquired) until 2005.    I used to work with clients who had horror stories of switching from a log-file based installation of, say, WebTrends to the (then) shiny new Google Analytics only to see (about a month or two later) their traffic “drop” off 20%, 30% or even more.

In fact, Google’s rollout of a “Free Business Analytics Tool” was a seminal moment.  It completely changed the game for the methodology and expectations that marketers had for measuring Web traffic.    But even today, differences exist in the way that Web analytics tools count visits and page views.  For example, if you visit a page, close your browser – then open the browser and visit that page again ten minutes later – Google counts that as two visits.  Adobe’s Site Catalyst treats it as one.

But after all of that – all in all – 10 years later – I suspect many of you are like me and aren’t fretting too much about the difference in Web analytics tools.   We’ve gotten over the fact that we’re never going to get a “dedicated analyst” as most experts recommend.   And, with some practice, and a good many over-caffeinated conference sessions we’ve developed our measurement processes, and massaged our dashboards into something that helps us be more successful.  We’re resigned to the fact that we only use about 20% of the reporting capabilities of our analytics package.    In fact a Forrester Report back in 2009 (PDF) found that only 2% of us use more than 90% of our Web analytics solution.  10 years later and none of us use everything Web analytics has to offer.

In short – we marketers never learned to love our Web Analytics system – but we’ve learned how to live with it.

Oh Boy, Here We Go Again

Jeremiah Owyang observed in a well-written report late last year that almost 50% of social media programs today live inside the marketing group.  And, the other half?  Well, they live in the other part of the business (customer service, product development etc..).   Jeremiah’s point is that the social business now needs a dedicated person; a “Social Corporate Strategist”.   And, this marketing person has two basic trajectories.  They can be a “social help desk” lackey or, through proactive strategic business programs, attain “escape velocity” and help the business develop its “social muscle”.

Guess what?  If you didn’t have the juice to get a dedicated Web Analytics person – you’re probably not soon going to have the luxury of a “social corporate strategist” on your next headcount list.   Put on another cup of coffee – and book yourself another conference – because here we go again – you get another hat to wear.

But This Time Let’s Wear Our Hat Differently

Susan Etlinger (also of the Altimeter Group) made a particularly wonderful point in a recent blog post.  Commenting on the Salesforce.com acquisition of Radian6 she said:

“The ubiquity of social data has democratized the practice of data analysis and spread it far beyond highly professionalized groups such as market research.   Today, everyone’s a data analyst”

My only quibble with that quote is that it wasn’t ”social data” – but rather Web analytics data and the necessity of the marketer’s ROI dilemma of the last few years that made “everyone a data analyst”.  The “ubiquity of Social Data” has only exacerbated an existing challenge.  As I’ve said before – marketer’s HATE math.  We didn’t become Google Analytics experts because we wanted to – we did so because we were forced to.   And now we not only have to be number crunchers – but need to be able to discern ROI out of non-mathematical “social” metrics such as “sentiment” and “semantic analysis” as well.   You can add “sociologist” to the ever-increasing skill sets you need to be an effective marketer these days.

Further, the democratization of social data has not only made us all analysts – it’s made every software provider an analytics tool. And this, of course, leads to ever more diverse set of methodologies around how we measure our social marketing efforts.   For every Sysomos, Radian6, Buzzmetrics and ScoutMetrics there are ten Hootsuites, Klouts, Twittalyzers, Bitl.lys, SocialToo’s and on and on….

So…. Is SalesForce’s acquisition of Radian6 a similarly seminal moment to Google’s acquisition of Urchin 6 years ago?  Frankly I don’t know.

What I do know is that we’ll fail before we even begin if we jump into tracking Social Media like we did Web analytics.  If we start looking at Klout’s Twitter metrics and wonder if @Windows is really 15% more influential than @Linux because of a 10 point difference in Klout scores we lose.  Is our competitor better than us if they have a higher sentiment analysis?  Really?  No of course not.   Put on another cup of coffee.

Or, worse (and I actually overheard this statement at a recent conference) “Our ‘positive sentiment analysis’ is up 16 points and our Web traffic is up 10%.  Social Media Works”.   Right?  No – Wrong.

This time let’s not set ourselves up for frustration and analytics failure.  Let’s start from the beginning and understand that at the end of the day – it’s not about numbers, or followers, or influence scores or sentiment uplift or any of that.   Just like coordinates on a map – these are all just points on a graph that help us indicate our direction.   Only WE can look around and tell if we’re on the beach or in a hurricane.

The Tool Is Only A Promise That You Have To Keep

The promise of Social Media Analytics to integrate data from our customers’ social graph – and use it to derive insight – CAN no doubt help us iterate our message into more relevant (and successful) efforts.    SalesForce’s acquisition will most likely accelerate this requirement in our business – and push us faster into providing numerical measurement into what we’re doing around our Social Marketing efforts.

But WE will have to make it happen with creativity and insight into WHY it’s important.  And, as we have the luxury of bringing on a “Corporate Social Strategist” – or more likely give this additional hat to our team – or even wear it ourselves – let’s just make sure we don’t set ourselves up for failure by focusing more on HOW our data compares to our neighbor – rather than WHY we’re ultimately gathering it – and WHAT it uniquely means to our business.

In case you haven’t noticed, using the Social Web for marketing’s nefarious purposes has exploded.   In fact, to say it’s grown in popularity is a little like saying Rebecca Black has a pretty popular YouTube video right now.

But when you couple this with the almost obsessive behavior that digital marketers have with Return on Investment (ROI) – you’ve got a whole bunch of marketing pasta in your hand.  Just throw it all against the wall.  That which sticks – is done.

Is it any wonder, that so many marketers are attempting to influence big bloggers and have their messages spread virally.

Do You Have Ze Klout?

(No I don’t know why I’m doing that in a German accent – but well there you are…)

Consider that major brands are starting to look at influence as a way to prioritize some “special services”.  Last year, Las Vegas’ Palms Hotel began using Twitter analytics provider Klout to provide “extras”.   As Jason Gastwirth, their Chief Marketing officer said the “Klout Klub” (there’s just something wrong with that name by the way) will  “allow high-ranking influencers to experience Palm’s impressive set of amentities in hopes that these influencers will want to communicate their positive experience to their followers.”

Or, how about Virgin America – who also partnered with Klout last year and gave away free flights to Twitter users based on “variables such as the quality and number of followers and retweets”.

Or, there’s Coach – who directed a user generated content campaign into a contest to see how many people would Tweet and blog, and spread the message about their brand.   They got more than 400 bloggers to set up sites and send thousands of tweets.  This was all with the promise of winning Coach branded merchandise.

So is this cool marketing and an innovative way to leverage social media?  Definitely.

Does this provide a Proof of ROI?  Probably.

Risky?  Well… let’s see…

250,000 Reasons To Watch Yourself

So, waaaay back in 2009 – when we were all singing “Poker face, My Po Po Poker Face” the Federal Trade Commission set guidelines and new rules for how bloggers would need to disclose financial arrangements with companies.

At the time, quite frankly no one paid it much attention – but it did make a few of the larger, more influential bloggers sniff – and ask aloud about whether the government was “sanitizing the internet.”

Then, mid-last year The FTC actually did something about it.  The fashion brand Ann Taylor created a campaign, where it invited “influential bloggers” to come to an event.  And, in return for blogging about the event within 24 hours, the attendees were promised gifts.   The FTC jumped onto it, and while they ultimately didn’t levy any actions against the brand – it was the first time that they actually made an investigation public.

But then last week the FTC actually bit down.  Legacy Learning Systems – a company that makes instructional DVD’s for playing instruments was actually caught paying affiliates a commission for positively “reviewing” their DVD’s.   The FTC came to a settlement with Legacy Learning Systems and the company had to pay $250,000.

Criticism came shortly after – wondering why if the bloggers were required to disclose why Legacy Learning was the one being penalized.  The FTC responded shortly after the settlement and said – “if law enforcement becomes necessary, our focus will be advertisers, not endorsers – just as it’s always been.”

Oops… We’re responsible?  Cue dramatic music…

Dun Dun Dunh!!

As marketers – as we start to put together our new social media marketing plans – we need to really start paying attention to compliance and disclosures – especially where money (or monetary value) is changing hands in exchange for actions taken by the communities we’re building.

Three things come to mind:

1. Get our policy house in order: We need to make sure that we create a disclosure policy for how we will manage and monitor (remember we’re responsible for monitoring) our relationships with the community.   We need to work with our legal teams to start creating that policy.
2. Get our process in place: I’ve talked about this at length here and here.  But it’s time for us to start treating the process of our Social Media efforts as a very real, and very important part of our content process.  Just as we wouldn’t just cavalierly throw out a banner ad campaign – so should our social media content and campaigns have similar thought.
3. Here There Be New Types Of Trolls – The Compliance Troll: Our campaigns with user generated content will, no doubt, produce wonderful results.  They will also produce bad apples.  We need to have processes in place for those bloggers, or users that decide that they want to be Trolls.  As compliance starts to become a bigger issue – watch for social trolls that will look to sabotage campaigns.

The good news is that it’s relatively straight forward and simple to put policies into place that will avoid these risks.   We just need to make sure that we’re careful – and don’t wind up with the most expensive social campaign we’ve ever run – just because we don’t watch our details.

As Legacy Learning has just learned – there’s 250,000 reasons to do it.

So, in the Star Trek Universe (yes I’m going there again) the Ferengi Alliance is a race of ultra-capitalists that thrive on commerce.  One of the core canons they live by is the “Rules of Acquisition”, which is a set of 300 or so guidelines that help one become more successful in business.   There is some doubt to actually how many rules there are in the “Rules of Acquisition” as the original author of the rules started the numbering at #162 so that there would be market demand for the other 161 that had yet to be written.  Cheeky eh?

Some of the rules are actually good practice (“Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to”) and some are just plain funny (“Never trust a man wearing a better suit than your own”).  But, my favorite is that there is the “Unwritten Rule” (which isn’t numbered of course) that is cited – which says “when no appropriate rule applies, make one up”.

Lately with content on the Social Web – it feels a bit like the rules of what makes appropriate marketing and conversation are being made up as we go along.  And, even more importantly it feels like the Social Media companies themselves may be unintentionally encouraging bad behavior with their business models.

Breaking Unwritten Rules

So, back in February, Kenneth Cole infamously tweeted that “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo.  Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available”.  The Twitterverse went ballistic – and shouted from rooftops about the insensitivity.  So, Kenneth Cole himself apologized for it.  Then, just last week – Gilbert Gottfried got fired from his job as the voice/spokesperson of the Aflac Duck for tweeting insensitive jokes about Japan.

Interestingly, as Alexandra Samuel pointed out in a blog post on HBR – the thing that got Kenneth Cole in so much trouble wasn’t the 132 characters of the Tweet – it was the one character of “#”.   By inserting the hashtag “#Cairo” into the tweet – Kenneth Cole inserted his comment into a specific conversation that was going on about the Egyptian revolution.    It would have been interesting to see what, if anything, the uproar would have been without the Hashtag itself.

Conversely, Gilbert didn’t use a hashtag when he tweeted out his jokes – but (and this is something that hasn’t really been covered at all) these jokes were re-tweeted (passed along) more than a 100 times each.  In fact, I did a search on Twitter for one of the jokes and found at least 120 RT’s of the original tweet.    Only  a very small percentage of them added any “disapproving” context.  Of those, most were “wow” and “too soon?”   However, the ensuing flare up left Aflac in an interesting position.  Should they wait out the response to see if it got bad – and risk seeming insensitive?  Or, should they act quickly and decisively –  fire Gottfried and risk.. well less.  They clearly chose the latter.

And, combine all this within the context of a meteoric rise of Charlie Sheen and his “find an intern” campaign which with two tweets generated $100,000 for the advertising company Ad.ly and who knows how much for Charlie himself.   And, of course – the results were more than a million unique visitors with 82,000 actual applications.

Bring On The Stunt Content

Two things strike me about these events – and there are lessons we can learn from each.  The first is that the social web properties and some of the metrics that currently surround the social web have built in the encouragement of the creation of what I call “stunt content”.

The whole “sponsored content” model of Twitter  (and to a lesser degree Facebook) is a celebration of what Kenneth Cole did – interrupt a conversation with what is ostensibly a brand advertisement.   And, further, until social metrics companies find a better way to measure impact than “quantity of retweets” and “quantity of content” then – we’re being encouraged to become more impactful by being more “controversial”.

We shouldn’t be surprised that wily marketers are figuring out ways to play this game for free – pushing the “unwritten rules” of what’s right.  We should expect big “Oops” like what happened to Habitat (in the UK) being caught spamming hashtags and attempting to get into trending topics?    And, we shouldn’t be shocked that it’s going to take ever-larger and ever-more controversial content for us to retweet it to our networks.

The second lesson is that as we start putting together our guidelines, and intentions for the conversations we want our brands to have on the Social Web – we’ve got to extend those lines clearly to those that we work with; even if we work with them at arm’s length.

Those that defend Gilbert’s “right” to say what he said – and defending it as “what a comic does” are missing the point entirely.  Of course he had the right to say it – and yes (as someone who spent a few years around comics) the source of a comic’s humor is often our darkest places.

And, of course Aflac had to know that Gilbert is one of the dirtiest comics in the world.   If you just look at his Twitter stream over the last few weeks – you can see some stuff that’s AS nasty if not even nastier then the tasteless Japan jokes.

But rather, the point with the Gilbert Gottfried example is that he forgot that Twitter is not an Open Mic at a comedy club.  He forgot – or maybe didn’t really even know – that there is (like it or not) a specific context to Twitter that’s emerging.  These “unwritten rules” are still being made up.  And he (especially as someone that has a cush job representing an insurance company) needs to be sensitive to that context or he’ll face the consequences.  Aflac acted quickly and decisively.  They had a line – and he crossed it.  That he didn’t know (or care) where it was, is something that’s known only between him and his employer.

The Lessons We Learn

I’ve said before that I think 2011 and 2012 will be the learning years for brand marketers on the Social Web.   These will be the first years that we start FIXING our Social Web Strategy, as opposed to creating one from scratch.

Just as people have asked if the Gap logo debacle was really a social media stunt – people are already wondering if the Kenneth Cole tweet fiasco was actually a deliberate campaign.   And, no doubt, we’ll see if Charlie ever really does hire an intern from that social Web campaign.  My guess, by the way, is that he will – and the stunt content will go from there.

So, it will be very tempting to try these things – and I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t try some stunt content.   But before we do let’s make sure we have a really really solid process behind us before so we know exactly HOW it’s going to go down.   Let’s first make damn sure that we have our social media governance and operating processes solid before we start coloring outside the lines.  In short, let’s make sure we draw our lines clearly – and communicate them to ALL that we do business with so that we KNOW when we’re crossing them.