The pulse for social media has grown over the last year, social media is a reality that should be in almost every marketing campaign. But, How good could be the efforts in new media if you don’t analyze its human impact from a target-oriented perspective? Surprisingly, since the campaign hype starts (see Gartner hype cycle), the launching and all the “social blah blah,” some marketers forget the essential part: identifying human marketing metrics. These will allow you to track the progress and measure the human ROI – both of them are vital parts for the success when applying Human Media.
Luckily, we can use a bunch of analytics tools that are already in the market to do so. Popular measurement systems such as Google analytics, awe.sm, Sysomos, Radian, TrackUR, Techigry, FlowTown or Brandschat, we all know that they help you to track leads, conversations and real numbers, but they also offer an opportunity to gather human information. Then, what areas should we paying attention to so we can measure human metrics?
Here you have some essential aspects for monitoring Human Media.
Human Metrics
- Human Business: make use of tools such as awe.sm so you can track human activity that can be turned into profits. Any human interaction that resonates with a business generates a connectivity effect that should end in getting closer to the customer: newsletters, subscriptions, new members, pre-orders, adding an item to a wish list, online budgets, etc. Ensure that you follow every single interaction and study if it creates behavioral patterns.
- WE-B Activity: everything related with your command base and yourself – business – as part of the ecosystem core. You can include here the number of times that you interact along the day, subscriptions from each platform – blog, web, facebook, RSS. Bear in mind that for a successful activity you should generate multi-dimensional conversations across the platforms, communities and users (the best way is measuring comments and responses) search if your blog or site it’s being referred by other sites or platforms too. Identify what human patterns happen.
- Engagement: every community interaction, it doesn’t matter if it’s through blog comments, facebook likes, foursquare tips, linkedin recommendations, retweets or Pins on pinterest and so on, they are extremely important, mentions are too. You should track positive mentions as well as negative and then compare and contrast the quantity and its quality. It may occur that you would get key insights in terms of human branding, and an understanding of the relationship of your brand with the market.
- Connectivity leads: how many people connects with your content? How it affects them? how many of them say “I have to share it with my friends”? put the distribution of your content in chunks and have a look to the statistics. Is there any brand sentiment through these interactions produced by the content? What is the most engaging action? What methods I use to connect? Where? How? Who does it? Consider what you can do to create closer ties with your community.
- Network: Who do you connect with? Discover the people behind the numbers, followers or fans - and why they are exposed to your content - How do they interact? Do they interact in a community way - among them? What does inspire them? What could you do to inspire them?
- Time: Once they arrive at your platforms. How human do you appear to them so they can stay longer? Time is not the most important thing, but how you use it, think about quality vs quality (not quantity) What do they look for when they come to you? How can you help them as fast as you can?
- Human Activity: Broadly speaking, how many people interact with your ecosystem? Take a look at your active database and compare the response rates and thus leads, with your active community. You should be able to develop campaigns to improve human interactions. Regularly, you may want to make a comparison and always try to reduce the ratio of passive interactions.
It’s not About the Tools
As you probably have observed in all these metrics, it is not about the tools, but what’s behind them, people and their interactions. Still, with so many tools available, there is no reason to not monitoring the human side of communication and the marketing that happens on the Internet.The information you get, it will help you create a greater connection with people in your community, resolve any problems with them, identifying patterns, and then successful processes - and the one that don’t work - and this will drive your efforts and resources to where it has to end up, creating human business interactions.
The new marketing is not about social media, complex technologies or last-generation software, it’s about human relationships, resonance and alignment with people. Although, I’m not saying anything you don’t know already.
Photo credit: transprism.
Staying Human