My client wants me to increase their Facebook fans by 40 per cent next year but are going to invest the same amount into Facebook as they did this year. How do I tell them that this is not a realistic KPI?

This is a question I get asked often. My answer typically is:

Tell me more about how their Facebook fan numbers will impact the client’s business? Are they planning on investing in some F-Commerce development? How will this make them money?

I must admit to being from the David Ogilvy school of thought: “We sell or else”. The measurement of success for us must be that we help our clients sell. Sure, the sell could be an idea rather than a product sometimes, but ultimately, our clients’ businesses exist to sell.

Welcome to capitalism.

In my experience the easiest way to work this out is to clarify some times:

• Metric – a set of figures or statistics that measure results (Oxford) or stuff that can be measured
• KPI or Key Performance Indicator – a metric or indicator that measures the success or failure of a business activity, it can be a strategic or tactical in nature. (As defined by me based on the Wikipedia entry): stuff that can be measured that really affects your business performance.
• In short, a KPI is a metric but not all metrics should be a DKa metric doesn’t have to be a KPI.

If our the objective for an organisation is to Sell More Stuff (SMS) or make money then we have to make the KPIs things that are impact your bottom line. This can be:

1. sales and leads
2. percentage defects
3. mean time to repair
4. brand preference
5. prompted and unprompted awareness and
6. the list goes on.

This is more important than the number of fans. However, as discussed in a previous post, the number of fans matters. But it should be a diagnostic metric, rather than a KPI.

Diagnostic metrics are the metrics tell you roughly where potential issues are and they can be the levers that you can pull to tune  campaign peformance.

To get to the KPI get as close to the revenue streams as you can. Generally, my preference in descending order is:

1. Revenue attributable to social
2. Leads attributable to social
3. Referrals
4. Share of positive voice
5. the list goes on.

And for the KPI, just pick one. I’ve seen lists of 10 KPIs and it’s totally unmanageable, unfocused and not a very good use of resources (budget or otherwise). On the other hand I might track a bunch of diagnostic metrics like fans, followers, retweets and comments. When 10 of these are woven into a picture, they become a very good indicator on campaign or program health. But they don’t necessarily change the business. You could have 1,000,000 followers but if they contribute nothing to your bottom line then is it really a key indicator of your business performance?

To clients who read this I say keep your agency honest and keep them working for your business. Make us earn our keep.

To colleagues who have clients asking about Facebook Fan numbers as KPIs, talk them through and find out what their real objectives are. I’ll leave you with David Ogilvy’s “We Sell or Else” call to arms.

Okay so in my previous post I contradicted “conventional wisdom” or at least one of the so-called “rules” of social media. Who’s heard of this one?

It’s not the quantity of fans that matter, it’s the number of engaged fans

That’s nice. It really is lovely. It sounds good. It absolves the social media guru from actually committing to fan numbers without actually saying so, but it also allows these people to chant as a mindless mantra in social media hippie guru land. Here are five reasons why they matter:

1. Quantity is a key factor to reach. Who would you prefer to be Starbucks with 26MM+ fans or Joe Blow’s cafe with 26? If about 10% of your updates actually reach your fans who has a better chance of hitting more fans?
2. Your CEO measures the success on Facebook by the number of fans
3. For technology products, the larger the pool available is for peer support
4. The larger your community is the higher the likelihood is that you will have a good cross section of the community to use in product development and fault detection
5. The larger your community the larger the number of supporters that can be rallied to support you in the event of a crisis

Does that mean that higher numbers are better in every scenario? No. Does that mean that you should measure the success of every campaign based on the numbers of fans acquired. Absolutely not.

What I’m saying is it’s critical that you think about the objectives of each social media campaign you go into and consider whether or not Facebook fan numbers could be a factor and not mindlessly follow these so-called “rules”.

If you hear someone say: “Fans & follower numbers don’t matter” on a social media blog, CLICK AWAY IMMEDIATELY. This is the exact type of social media guru platitudism (yes that’s a word) you don’t need. Fans & follower numbers MATTER.

Now that I’ve started by being contentious, let me explain.

Most of the time, if you ask a client / marketing director / CEO what the objective of the campaign is, the answer is almost universally

Sell More Stuff (SMS)

Of course it is. If you’re:

• an automotive company you want to… sell more cars
• a FMCG you want to… sell more toothpaste, food, etc…
• a politician you want to… sell more votes

The list goes on.

There are multiple reasons why this objective is not useful but fundamentally, it’s too big an objective and it’s not specific enough. For example, you can SMS by optimising your supply chain so that you can actually make enough units to meet demand. That has nothing to do with your social media campaign.

So whenever my guys tell me that the client says the objective is to SMS, I say to them, dig deeper.

And by digging deeper I want them to ask these questions:

1. Who’s product / issue targeted at?
2. What are the demographic / psychographic / personas who we are trying to motivate?
3. What is it we want them to DO? This one is important. Spell out the next physical action we want them to take.
4. What’s their current attitude?
5. How are the social elements going to be woven into the campaign?
6. Where do these people hang out? Physically, and online.

Once you know this information, setting an objective will be much easier and you will be able to see how your objectives for social media channels fit in to the overall picture and whether they can actually become the overall campaign objectives.

When I have this information I will often go away to do some additional desk research. I may use a listening tool to get an indication as to what’s happening out there. I may rely on research from a research house or tap my own networks for people who work in different parts of the company.

Once I have this information I take myself away from my desk and literally just stare into the distance for a bit and digest and distill the information. When the thinking is done, usually I come back with an objective that looks like this:

We will increase preference for Brand X amongst Young Women aged 18-24 by 15% in the next three months

By framing the objective this way, we can now set out to achieve it and ultimately serve the wider business/capitalist objective of SMS.

More importantly, you can measure it beyond the platitudes of “Generate buzz”, “starting a conversation” or heaven forbid “Engage our audience”.

This is the first in a series of posts regarding social media measurement.

first of all, location based services have utility. i’m not talking just about the coupons and deals you can get on foursquare (and soon to facebook places). i’m talking about knowing where your friends or family members are. for kristen foursquare saved her life. my friend josh uses facebook places checkins to let his friends know which pub his at on a pub crawl. i personally like using both of those services to get tips and leave tips for other people. it’s especially when you land in a new city and need to know the best place for some r&r.

the key to utilising these services effectively is maintaining control over your information, as i discussed with a journalist last week.

everything is public on the internet

the dogmatic privacy boffins would say that all information on the internet is public. to a certain extent they’re right, but you need to inject this with a health dose of realism as well. an analogy is using your credit card online. yes it can be dangerous, and if you card number gets stolen (particularly if it’s a visa/mastercard debit card) you could be out of pocket to large amounts of dollars, until such time as the bank returns it. but you take reasonable precautions and you’re probably more likely to have your card skimmed at an atm.

control is an illusion, you don’t really control your data

again, this is also true in some respects. facebook has in the past, and probably will in the future, change its policies or expose your data on purpose or by accident. no doubt foursquare could misstep in a similar form or fashion. my argument is rather than not use something that is truly useful, why don’t we put those energies into bringing control back? forcing developers to make secure applications and safeguard privacy policies? thousands drown each year, does that mean we should ban beaches and swimming pools or teach people to swim and train lifeguards?

• notifications
• group chat
• document sharing
• a much nicer interface

what it is not unfortunately is a new way to manage privacy. when i initially saw this announcement, i thought they would match diaspora’s ‘aspects’ functionality. especially given zuckerberg’s blog post:

“the biggest problem in social networking is helping you easily interact with your friends and share information in lots of different contexts.”

an aspect is exactly that, a reflection of an aspect of your real life. aspects of your life might be family, close friends or work colleagues.

diaspora allows you to place people into these aspect groupings so that content you share with those aspects remains within the aspect. So an off-colour joke to your close friends is not shown to your work colleagues. People in those aspects don’t know they’re in the aspect. And more importantly they can’t add people to the aspect, only you can.

after some testing within the sydney digital influence team we established fairly quickly that the new facebook groups is not the equivalent. there were several issues we found that clearly made groups unsuitable for this purpose:

• members can add members: as the person sharing the content, this does not give you absolute control to who can see the content. Like the most recent internet meme karen owen. As the group admin you are able to retrospectively block and ban permanently
• the member is aware that they are in the group: which also makes it harder for you to compartmentalise people. You can’t call a group ‘acquaintances’ because the people in that group may consider themselves your best friend
• which also means that as a member if all of my colleagues had a group called ‘colleagues’ i could be a member of 20 ‘colleagues’ groups. Annoying.
• you must opt out of notifications. If one of my friends sets up a group for their business or gaming site and invites me, i automatically join AND can start receiving EMAILS from them without opting in.
• The next problem with having to OPT OUT is that if a friend of mine creates a Pro Life or Pro Choice group and invites me, i AUTOMATICALLY join it! which shows up in my group memberships. there are multiple issues with this!

ultimately, the groups app is actually a good app for groups to share and collaborate within. the interface is great, much better than the old groups. the problem is simply the way zuck’s positioned it opens the company up to more privacy criticism.

(this post also appears on australiadigitalmap.com)

allow me to clarify. client asks you to roll out a campaign, there’s an event, the event hashtag goes crazy, you’re trending on twitter, client loves you. three days later, you do a search and find nothing. zilch. nada. that’s because twitter search does not persist. so when people go looking for information after the event, you get no link backs to your campaign site, and there’s no ‘word on the twittersphere about your campaign’. not ideal right?

now just to clarify what i meant about slideshare. if you upload any presentations from the event to slideshare, it will live there and your content will be searched for and found ad infinitum.

ok, so the headline is a little bit controversial and a bit of bait. but here’s the dealio. what you want to do, is aggregate the hash tag stream on an open, search engine friendly platform. that might be a wordpress site as an aggregator, tumblr or some other bespoke system, this has to be done if you want the conversations to be found down the track.

thanks to jeremiah owyang for the prompt to commit this post to paper. he talks about using a live blogging application which is great idea. this works well if you have an official blogger at the event. what a campaign aggregator will do though is capture everything on the hashtag (and any other social media) not just what your official blogger is doing.

this post also appears on asiadigitalmap.com

• rachael falk, legal counsel, from telstra and
• matthew gain, digital director, edelman

the panel was moderated by kara-lee from amnesia.

i spoke about the practical application of our crisis comms framework but thought it might be of note to some attendees if i broke the framework down. check it out and let me know if it’s useful. it’s just our current thinking. we evolve this stuff all the time as we handle more and more crises.

the facebook for business session is really a 101 on how to get started in building a facebook presence for businesses. below is the deck that i shared with the attendees. note that the number of facebook users today has officially reached 500 million.

craig badings and craig pearce colleague and ex-colleague here at ogilvy were discussing issues and crisis management over on mr pearce’s blog. given that they were talking about a conversation we’d had i thought i throw in my two cents worth.

let me preface this by saying the gentlemen mentioned are seasoned pros with years of this stuff under their belt and it was an honour to be included in the conversation. definitely one of the perks working for ogilvy.

mr bading’s and i had the opportunity to work together on a high profile brand crisis and throughout the crisis we evaluated our actions and evaluated against best practices. as social media is just another type of channel, most of the same rules applied. there were however a number of key differences which i will outline in a series of posts. i’ll start with this one.

handling a crisis

the basic rules, are:

• communicate openly and honestly
• correct factual inaccuries
• communicate regularly

this is an over simplification, but they’re the basics.

respond or not to respond?

mr badings points out that in the traditional media world you want the whole thing to blow over. don’t inflame the situation if you can avoid it. there is no point in creating a longer than necessary news cycle. which can sometimes mean you don’t go back and correct factual inaccuracies if it looks like the news cycle is ending anyway. whether the client has done anything wrong or not, constant discussion about it the crisis will associate the brand with that crisis which is generally not a good thing. once it all blew over, people forgot and no one ever hears about it again.

this worked. it worked quite well. but news back then was contained to a local area and researching old news involved sifting through rolls and rolls of microfilm. if a crisis erupted for a brand in new york, it would not be a major deal for the brand in sydney. you couldn’t simply google a brand.

not so today

news today is not contained. it is not temporary. so it’s not possible to just bury it. the technology has changed, we need to reconsider if and how we respond.

the challenge now is, if you google a brand, you get all the bad stuff, as well as the good and people can go back even before the internet began. every subsequent generation around the world will see the situation and analyse it and it becomes associated with your brand, like it or not.

so the question is, do risk inflaming a situation by responding, even to correct inaccuracies at the risk of making it worse? it’s a case of making a decision that may hurt in the short term, but leave a better internet memory.

by responding, in the short term, you extend the news cycle and more people see it and associate it with your brand. in the long term, if you don’t those future generations will continue to see only the factual inaccuracies.

these things are never cut and dried though. unlike other commentators i don’t prescribe one path over another because it’s a ‘commandment of social media’. ‘thou shalt engage’, ‘though shalt be transparent’ etc… baloney.

what’s problematic about making a decision that may hurt in the short term is that it could be so painful it kills the organisation. it won’t be internet memory that you have to worry about but internet memoriam.

consider this next time you or a client is in crisis mode. there are no simple answers, anyone offering one is a quack. each situation is different but do consider this when you think about acting on the old adage of letting the story die a natural death. is not necessarily the right thing to do anymore.

in the midst of the hurley burley of crisis mode, a news story caught my eye­. killer george sodini went berserk in a pennsylvania gym and killed three, wounding nine before turning the gun on himself. the thing about it is, he blogged about doing it. that’s when the idea sparked.

so i did some digging

it’s not the first time, that social media was used by a killer or a suicide victim to declare their intentions. with a quick search, i found paul zolezzi, a model who declared he was going to kill himself on facebook and did. more interestingly though, i found hsu yu-sheng.

hsu yu-sheng

hsu is a gay and lesbian rights activist in taiwan, who on august 6 wrote a farewell note on his blog in english. After seeing the note, readers of his blog, launched a full scale effort to save him. friends and strangers alike, thousands of people banded together, to try to track him down and others posted kind comments to his blog.

police arrived at hsu’s place just in time and saved his life.

the idea

we use social media monitoring tools such as radian6 to listen to conversations on the blogosphere and elsewhere to protect brands. it’s not a stretch to deploy these tools to protect people.

how it would work

1. radian6 set up to listen for a list of keywords
2. suspect posts are parsed through to a heuristic analysis engine to further determine the sentiment of the post. radian6 is has a automatic sentiment engine built in, but we need one that would be tuned to suicidal/homicidal sentiments
3. results that come up positive there are alerted to the on duty psychiatrist for an assessment and to alert the relevant authorities

there would be many issues that would have to be dealt with to make the system viable, feasible and workable and even then it would never be a certainty. what it would be is another tool in kitbag to tackle an extremely complex and difficult problem.

this post was first published on the howorth blog