SOC11: Measuring the Result of the Bright and Shiny

Seth Meranda 
User Experience Architect, University of Nebraska-Lincoln


The audio for this podcast can be downloaded at http://2011.highedweb.org/presentations/SOC11.mp3



Announcer: This is one in a series of podcasts from the HighEdWeb Conference in Austin 2011.

Seth Meranda: Today we're going to talk a little bit about social media, mostly pertaining to how we can start to get our minds wrapped around how we measure effectiveness of social media.

Now, I like to walk around during my presentation, so if I get too close to an edge, somebody please warn me here.

[Laughter]

Seth Meranda: Social media has been one of the most exciting new features, if you will, in this Web world, and I think a lot of us have tried to grapple some possible way of measuring our effectiveness with social media. I think there's a lot of different ways to do this. Some ways work well, some don't. There's a lot of tools out there to help us. Today we're going to try to focus on that framework and see what we can do in getting our mindset around how we measure those things.

I will start by saying that I am not the smartest at most social media. I am not a social media expert. There's a lot of people in this room that are much better at social media. What I bring into it is the web analytics role.

 01:07

Just like every other presentation we have, there is a back channel, but we're going to do something a little bit different with our back channel today, if you will. We're going to do a little experiment. After all, this is a social media track, this is HighEdWeb, we can do all these things with HTML, CSS, Javascript.

Two hashtags. #soc11q, if you have some sort of question, put that up there. #soc11, if you have some sort of new ideas or something else you want to bring to the conversation, add that there. And as you can see, we will be bringing those up into the presentation while we're talking.

So, experiment. We're going to see how this works, so be nice to me.

Expand the discussion. Share your experiences. If you've come across something that's really cool that maybe I haven't touched on or anything, add it to the group. Let's start some discussions on that.

 02:02

OK, framing social media. I want to make sure we're on the same page about what we're talking about here.

Social media to me describes the pipes. They are the conduits for our content, if you will. Social media interactions describes what we're doing with these pipes. So when we're having our conversations in social media or when we are creating content that goes into social media, for the sake of this presentation, we're going to talk about that as social interactions. Social media is the pipes, social interactions are what we're doing with those pipes.

Important to understand is how social media is a little bit different. Social media is different than our traditional marketing realm.

Now I am a trained marketer. That's what my academic experience is all about is in marketing. I worked in university communications, our central marketing department, so a lot of what I talk about is marketing-related.

 03:05

Marketing has been around for quite some time, and we've set up marketing in such a way where we create some sort of message. We build this message, and this can be some sort of content message, it can be some sort of other marketing brand-related message. We craft that message and then we just push it out there. We use various channels, we buy different pieces of media, we do all this to push this message out there.

And then our audience does something with it. We don't know what they're going to be doing with that message all the time, but it's up to them to figure out what they want to do with it. Our goal is that they sink in and they buy that message, they believe that message, they share that message. But we don't always know exactly what they've been doing.

Well, with social media, now we have an opportunity to start figuring that information out a little bit better. We can start looking at things that are happening.

 04:05

The marketing messages might not change with social media. They might, they could, they should in a lot of cases, but they might not change. But we now have this digital footprint of these marketing messages that we never had before.

When I look at social media, there is really two different types of analysis that we can run.

One is an engagement analysis, and that's when we're actually analyzing the way we are engaging in social media. So if we are corresponding with an individual, if we are creating content, that's engaging.

The other type of analysis is environmental, and this is when we are a little more passive. We're just out there watching what's going on. So we are scanning our brand name, for instance, we're scanning our institution's hashtag, and we're just determining what people are saying or not saying about our brand.

 05:00

I think it's important to understand the two differences because I'll go in a little bit later talking about different measurement tools that support both of those objectives.

Why has social media ROI been so difficult to analyze? If you think about all of our marketing efforts up to the advent of social media, we've all been very focused on different ways to analyze that.

When we're doing advertising campaigns, we can hold focus groups to figure out how well things are resonating with our audience. We get numbers from metrics and metrics from our advertising people telling us how many people we've reached. When it comes to just traditional Web content, we have a great source in web analytic software out there that's going to help us analyze all that.

But social media itself seems to have had a little bit of a struggle in determining an effective approach to an ROI. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that.

 06:02

One, I believe social media starts as a small test on the side. How many people, the very first time they got into social media, was because your institution created a brand new position for you? Exactly. Not very many. Congratulations back there.

[Laughter]

Seth Meranda: Social media itself has always been something that we just started to fiddle with. We've started to play with it, and we're trying to just jump in and get our feet wet with it more than we are really focusing on it completely as a new paradigm.

Social media tends to occur outside our normal funnels. For those of you that are in the admissions offices or alumni engagement offices, you know that there are certain funnels that you already have established.

We have an admissions funnel where we bring prospects all the way down to the applicant and eventually enrollment stage. Those are all funnels that have very concrete objectives, milestones, and those are all areas that we already have tracking around.

 07:10

But social media, a lot of times, is a response and a question, something that happens maybe outside of those funnels, and therefore we can't really connect it in such a fashion.

Finally, social media leverages already-accounted-for resources. You guys are doing social media on top of everything else that we're doing. Especially when we're starting, most circumstances, no one's paying you more to do this social media. Therefore, if you fail at it, we're not losing any money. If you're succeeding at it, great. I made a lot more money, if you will, to put a financial number to it.

So there hasn't been a huge push for social media ROI, mostly because we haven't had a need for it. But I think that's beginning to change as we're starting to see a lot of institutions wisely creating these social media coordinator positions and various other positions. There's a lot more skin in the game when it comes to social media, and ROI is going to be something that's going to be very closely scrutinized.

 08:17

One of the first questions that was always brought up with social media, it's a question that we've had for a long time, is, what is the ROI? This isn't something new. Everyone's been asking this question. And a lot of the very first answers have been, 'Well, there's no ROI. It's just social media. It just happens. '

And I think that that's wrong. I think that that's something that we can debunk. I think we can figure something out for that. I think we owe it to ourselves to figure out a better way to measure this.

A lot of times, the answer to that question is, 'Well, I'll figure it out after I get going. I'll start in social media, and then eventually I'll figure it out.' And I think this is fine. This can work. There's nothing wrong with this approach.

 09:03

The only concern I have here is that this usually just increases your amount of work. There's more work involved in not setting out the foundation ahead of time. So you're laying the tracks as you're driving the train, and you find yourself adjusting your techniques based around maybe wrong information or based off of analytics that might not actually make a whole lot of sense as a measurement for what you may or may not be doing.

So instead, I usually say, 'Let's do a reset on all this.' I think social media is very important, but does it provide the most value for your institution right now?

And in my case, since we're going to answer that, I'm going to say, 'Yeah, it does.' So the next question is, how? And this is where ROI and social media analytics really starts is how social media create the most value for your institution at this given time. So we start creating social media strategies.

 10:08

And this is where things start to diverge from a good, solid ROI standpoint is we start to create these strategies outside of our typical and normal strategies that might already exist.

We actually don't plug into social media. If you think about it, we don't actually go in and just become social media. Social media becomes a part of our already existing communication strategy.

Social media is really just a digital manifestation of analog conversations that are already happening. They're just happening a lot easier, as we saw with what Chris was talking about. We're seeing a lot. It's just the digital manifestation that are happening now. We have the tools available to us to carry on these conversations in a little bit more open, a little more real time, and a lot more stronger avenues.

 11:03

But that doesn't mean our communication strategy necessarily has to change. We still have the same message. We're still the same institution. We haven't changed our institution because of social media, and we haven't changed who we are.

So let's use social media as that approach. The very first thing when creating a social media strategy that we want to be able to track is to really set up our objectives.

Social media itself is a tactic behind our objectives. Social media is a channel. It is one of those pipes that we're using. We have various pipes that we're using; we're using email pipes, we're using print pieces as pipes, we're using all of those different things. Social media is just another one of those pipes, so it becomes one of our tactics that we're going to be using. And whatever our strategy is, social media is one of those approaches that we'll use to support that.

The good news is we already have these objectives. I just talked about our communications strategies, as admissions officials, or as alumni, or in your central marketing department, or even your advisers. Everyone has these objectives already.

 12:13

If we're advising students, we want to help them get to the correct classes they need to take at the correct time. If we're in admissions, we're trying to recruit students. If we're in alumni, we are trying to get more donors. If we are in the central marketing department, we are trying to increase our brand awareness, which, brand awareness aside, is a made-up measurement that don't get me started on. Someday I'll tell you about that one.

But we already have all these objectives, so we're just going to plug into those. And what makes that really nice is that those are much more susceptible to tracking.

Tactics are how we implement. Tactics are made up of targets and milestones. Targets are quantifiable. Targets, these are the numbers that we are trying to shoot for.

 13:04

If we are an alumni office and we are looking at donations, we probably already have some target where we're saying, 'We want X amount of donations every month attributed, X amount of new donations.' Well, these are already set up as our targets. Social media, we're going to be able to start using ways to figure out whether or not that increased our donations.

Targets are important. I think this is one thing that gets skipped a lot. We have our big objective. Targets are at certain intervals that we're measuring to determine if we are still on cue for our objective. But they do a couple other things.

One, they keep people held accountable. I think targets often get thrown to the side when they really should be there to help keep people accountable, but they should also be there as that carrot on that stick. That's where we're trying to get to.

If we have a goal of X amount of donations over a year, we're not going to be able to know if we achieved that goal until after the end of the year, whereas the milestone, we're going to be able to say, 'OK, we need this much by August, this much by September,' etcetera.

 14:23

So this is a way for us to be held accountable, but yet to keep our eye on the game and keep our eye on the prize as well.

So what shall we measure? There are two key quotes in here that I like to share with anybody, and this isn't just social media but this is measurements in general.

"Just because you can measure it doesn't mean it matters." Social media is probably the worst at this. There are statistics that have absolutely no value out there that are being thrown around by a bunch of startups and everybody else who's found a new way to categorize different things inside social media.

 15:05

Now in some certain circumstances, they do matter. There is importance to them. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that Klout has no value whatsoever. Klout certainly does have value in certain circumstances.

But what we need to be careful is that we're not setting our social media goals based around the metrics that are available easily out there for us. So if we are not trying to increase our influence, if our objective has nothing to do with increasing our influence, well, then Klout is probably not something that we are going to need as a metric tool.

And for anybody who's ever spent any time in news editorial or working with anybody on the news side of things, especially the newspaper industry itself, you'll know that they have this quote, and that basically says, "If it wasn't measured, it didn't happen." And I think this is key.

 16:00

We have the ability to measure almost everything that happens out there. Sometimes it's more difficult than others to measure it, but the point being, the newspaper industry has dictated this as, if it didn't get measured, then it didn't happen.

The only way they can sell advertising is based off of page views or visits and stuff like that, and if they're not tracking that, this being the newspaper industry, then they have no way of being able to prove that it happened. And I think the same thing applies here in social media analytics.

To me, social media metrics fall under a few categories.

The first category is Reach. We have various different metrics out there that fall under how many people or how many individuals we were able to reach with our content. This could be something like Facebook fans, Twitter followers. Anything along those lines fall under the Reach category.

 17:06

Branding category reaches a few steps further and actually looks at the content that might be in some sort of environmental analysis of tweets or Facebook or anything like that where we're looking for mentions of our institution's name and we're trying to determine if they're positive or negative mentions.

Software has gotten a lot better. It still has ways to go, but there are ways that we can figure out how well things can be positively or negatively attributed to our brand.

Actions are the actual engagements that some people will have with our content. This is something like a Facebook comment post, a retweet, a comment on a YouTube video. Something like that are actions. These are their own metric category as well.

 18:03

Finally, there's a Cost metric associated with social media, not just the cost in what it is to spend on engaging social media but also the cost saved by using social media.

I always like to use the example of Time Warner Cable, because I think they do an excellent job of using Twitter as a customer support mechanism where they scan, they do an environmental analysis of tweets based on Time Warner Cable, and if somebody has a problem that they've mentioned on Twitter or even if it's just a general rant like I have been doing a lot with Time Warner Cable on Twitter, they will respond and they will provide either actionable insights that you can take or they'll try to help you out with your problem.

Well, that is saving their telephone department, their help desk, costs. They are now helping out in a channel that's already there that their end users are using, and they're not having to rely on their end user to call telephone support and get all that help there. So that is helping costs along those lines.

 19:13

And then finally, one of the other categories is Reputation. Reputation is very similar to brand, but one of the statistics that I like to look at in here is, we're looking at reputation issues avoided.

There are opportunities that an environmental analysis will pull up, very similar to that Time Warner Cable example, where we see something that might be false or might not be accurate. And if we are analyzing this and we can intervene in some sort of fashion that we help or we correct the situation, we have an opportunity there to avoid some sort of reputation issue.

The beauty about this is not only are we avoiding reputation, but we are doing it in that user's communications channel directly in front of all of his or her friends. So if we're helping a prospective student with an issue, we're also helping all of his friends that have seen his issue take place.

 20:20

One of the examples I like to use is, in 2008, we had a gentleman that was going to come to our education department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln they had invited in early 2008. The gentleman to come to our institution, he was a very well-known, very respected educator from the University of Illinois. He's a faculty member who was going to come speak on our campus about some of the great research and thought leadership that he has been doing in the education department. So they invited him to come along.

Well, in 2008, that was the year that President Obama was elected, and as part of the end of President Obama's campaign, there was a lot of conflict between the two sides about a gentleman by the name of William Ayers.

 21:05

Now William Ayers, he was a radicalist in the 1960s who had some unique thoughts and viewpoints and actions with the United States government in the 1960s. William Ayers went on to work with President Obama on a couple of different things through the University of Illinois. William Ayers was that gentleman whom we had invited to come to our institution to speak.

Well, the state of Nebraska is a red state, and they did not really respect the fact that William Ayers has now moved on to be a faculty member and had some very convincing things to come over to our campus.

So there was a lot of different controversy that got stirred up. It went all the way to the point where the governor basically threw my university under the bus, and William Ayers, his visit was cancelled, mostly because there were some very serious death threats that the police department had to take very seriously, both on Mr. Ayers and other members of our university.

 22:10

Well, 2008, we didn't have Facebook. Well, we had Facebook, but no one knew how to use it. We had Twitter, but no one knew how to use it. That would've been an opportunity for us maybe, maybe, I'm not saying it would've been, but maybe it would've been an opportunity for us to get in there and avoid a really bad reputation issue that ended up getting to the point where our governor basically threw the whole entire university and our chancellor under the bus, like I said.

So social media would've had an opportunity there, and that would've been a metric that I could've came back and hopefully attributed to some fashion as part of our goals.

OK, so let's put all these into action. Let's look at how we can use what's available out there. I think there's a lot of great tools out there, and I'm going to talk about a couple by looking at a few specific examples.

 23:03

How am I doing on time? OK.

I want to show one video here. This is a video that actually has nothing to do with higher ed per se, but I want to talk about it as a way to frame possibly our discussions here.

Oh, no. My sound is not...

Video 1: I don't want to talk about this here.

Video 2: Why not?

Video 1: I just don't feel comfortable discussing it here. I don't want somebody listening in.

Video 2: There's nobody listening in.

Video 1: Well, you never know.

Video 2: Lauren, this is ridiculous. Will you just talk to me?

Video 1: Jack, I don't know what to say. I don't know what we should do.

 24:00

Video 2: What do you mean you don't know what we should do? Why are you being like this?

Video 1: Why do you always have to throw it back at me like that, like everything is always...

Video 2: I'm not throwing it back at you.

Video 1: Yes, you are.

Video 2: Can we just please talk like adults for once?

Video 1: Well, if it were up to me, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Can we just get the check and go?

Video 2: Lauren, I think that you're making this into much more of a big deal than it really is.

Video 1: How can you say that after everything that's happened, that it's not that big of a deal? Really, Jack? Because as far as I remember, this is the exact same conversation that we had two months ago.

Video 2: I just don't understand why this has to be an issue. You think things are so black and white, but it's not always that simple.

Video 1: I don't see what's complicated about this.

Video 2: OK, fine. Tell me, Lauren: what do you think we should do? What do you want?

 25:02

Video 1: I don't know.

Video 2: Really? That's your answer? "I don't know?" After everything, this is what it comes down to? This?

Video 1: First of all, this is not about me.

Video 2: No, it's not. It's not about you. You sure about that?

Video 1: Jesus, Jack, can't you grow up and just take some responsibility for once?

Video 2: This is outrageous! I didn't do anything wrong.

Video 1: You know what? I'm tired of having the same fight with you!

Video 2: Oh, yeah?

Video 1: You tell me you're going to change, but you never do!

Video 2: I just don't know what to say to you right now.

Video 1: It looks like we might not even have anything to say to each other.

Seth Meranda: I don't know if you can see that, but it says, "A simple story between lovers can prevent lifelong issues."

 26:02

"To err is human, but to forgive is divine."

Video 2: I'm sorry. I never meant to hurt you. I don't want you to lose over something like this.

Video 1: Me neither. I'm sorry, too. I guess I overreacted. I hate it when we fight.

Video 2: Me, too.

Video 1: And he asked me if I wanted to do a couple of the Christmas cards here. Really? Yeah, in six months, yeah. And I was really surprised, because I'm like, 'What guy wants to do a...'

 27:04

Seth Meranda: Great little video there. Marco was actually an Austin person. He lives and works here in Austin.

I think that demonstrates the kind of ability that, if you look at an analog situation that's already happening and you look at that as maybe now how did social media very similar to that.

What we just saw there was a restaurant using listening tools to better enhance the experience of its customers. We don't know what would've happened if those two individuals would've left that situation mad at each other, but what we do know is that at the end, they made up there. And that itself is a metric. The fact that we were able to repair that potential relationship was a metric.

 28:02

But what's more important to us as the restaurant is that we've now created an experience that is tracked based off of that. We now have a positive mention, a positive affinity to our restaurant based off of the experience that those individuals had.

OK, let's look at something a little bit more higher ed-related now. For those of you that know me, I cut my teeth in the admissions office. And I love the admissions office. I think there's a lot of fantastic things that happen in admissions offices across the world, across the country.

But one of the things I really like them is because admissions offices are already very data-driven. We already have metrics and stuff in our admissions offices. And social media strategies are something that we can really plug into what we already have going on.

Admissions offices have already done a great job of tracking data, making decisions based off of data, and using that data henceforth forward. So when we're looking at a lot of this, we're trying to get some  actionable insights that we can use based off of those data to better situate our social media.

 29:16

A very common objective inside admissions offices is to increase out-of-state students. As a land-grant, state-funded institution like the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, this is important to us. It brings diversity to our student population, but it also brings a differential tuition to our university. Out-of-state students pay more tuition than in-state students.

So we're going to set a target. We're going to set a target of 1,100 out-of-state incoming student enrollments for the 2011-2012 cycle. This is actually very close to numbers that our university is currently using. I think, since I set this up, we have adjusted things a little bit, but the idea behind it is the exact same, that we're looking for that number.

 30:02

So we need to get enrollments. Well, if your institution is anything like mine, enrollments is a number that doesn't get reported until Census date in the fall of the following cycle. So right now, I don't know how many enrollments I'm going to have until students actually enroll. They don't enroll until Summer. But at Summer, that's too late for me. I need to get more data sooner.

Admissions departments are very familiar with something called the admissions funnel, and basically the admissions funnel says, 'We have X amounts of prospects. That gets whittled down to this amount of applicants, and that gets whittled down to that amount of enrolled students.' It's a lot bigger than that and there's a little more steps than that, but essentially that's the idea.

So knowing that, knowing that I have an admissions department that has kept historical numbers, I can go back and I can look at what I can track on a regular basis. And I can track applicants. I can track how many people apply to my university, and I can do that because I have web analytics set up on my admissions application.

 31:14

And applicants, those happen to become an all-year-round. Now they increase a lot more towards early Winter and late Winter, but nonetheless, they can start applying at any time.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually set my target to be 4,500 applicants. I know because of my funnel that 4,500 out-of-state applicants is what I'm going to need to get to my 1,100 out-of-state enrollments.

So I have this number, 4,500 applicants. I can split that out over my admissions cycle to figure out exactly how many that means a month, weighting it based off certain things that I know about historical, that more people are going to apply in January than they are going to apply in September, etcetera. But the important part is that I've set my target there. I've set that milestone.

 32:12

With that, I'm going to set up what are some primary KPIs. And I'm going to talk about just the social media primary KPIs, KPIs being Key Performance Indicators. These are going to be how I can dictate whether or not I am on track to hit my target.

One of the things I can first look at is positive online mentions of UNL leading to 2011. I'm going to put these all up here on the screen and then I'm going to talk about them individually in a second.

I'm going to look at "net new likes", and I use that in quotes. That just essentially means somebody connecting with my social media content. That could be Facebook fans, that could be Twitter followers, etcetera. But the important thing is I want to make sure I'm looking at my target audience specifically.

 33:00

So for running a university-wide Facebook page, in this current objective, I don't care as much if a 60-year-old alumni likes my Facebook page. That has nothing to do with this current objective. It's one of the reasons why I think Facebook fan counts is something that needs to be taken with a very large grain of salt.

Finally, I'm going to look at click-throughs of links leading to my admissions.unl.edu from out-of-state students. The important thing is we have web analytics. Web analytics are very powerful, they are very useful, and we can tie these to goals. And I think that's an important thing to be said here is that we need to make sure that we are tying these goals inside our web analytics environment.

OK, so I've set up my primary KPIs. I also did want to look at my secondary KPIs. These are going to be new likes of UNL content from in-state. I don't want to ignore my in-state. I want to make sure that everything along those lines is going fine as well. While my current objective is on out-of-state, that doesn't mean that it has to take over and knock down my in-state as well.

 34:16

Same kind of concept here. We're looking to make sure we still have our click-throughs from in-state students.

So how are we going to get these metrics? Positive online mentions of UNL leading to 2011. There are a lot of tools out there that will do something called 'sentiment analysis.' Sentiment analysis is basically saying, 'Is the textual content here positive or negative?' and we want to look to see positive or negative.

Why are we looking at this metric?

One is we need to set a baseline. In order to increase, we have to know where we started from. Two, we can't expand if we have to climb out of a hole. If we go through an environmental analysis and we looked through all the content related to our brand from our market and we see that we have a lot of negative mentions out there, we're probably going to need to re-set up our objective here. We've got to start with something positive or, at least at the very best, neutral.

 35:18

So how do we get this information? Well, I think it's very important to understand that a lot of these tools right now, you have to set them up, and then they'll start collecting data henceforth for us. Something like Radian6 will do this for you.

Radian6 is a great tool for a lot of different reasons. It will provide sentiment analysis. It will scour the Web of mentions and rate of positive or negative based on your search queries. It's a tool that will do this.

But unfortunately, like so many of the other tools is you have to set it up ahead of time. So my suggestion is to go out... HootSuite is another one that will do a little bit of this. I've seen something called IceBreaker or something like that.

Audience 1: IceRocket.

Seth Meranda: IceRocket, thank you. IceRocket, they do a little bit of this in there as well.

 36:10

Set these up now, if you have an opportunity to get out there and set them up, because they're only going to start tracking things from the second you set them up. So you can't go back to 2010-2011 easily without getting some very expensive consulting services to help you with that. So set those up and get an idea of what's going on there. But Radian6 is one that will get you that information.

All right, net new likes of UNL content on Facebook page, Twitter mentions. The idea here is, find an increase in the number of people that are considering our content worthwhile. The idea here is not that they like us because they like our brand. It's mostly because they have now moved to an affinity marketing segment.

 37:01

So these are now individuals that if you think back to you admissions funnel, these will be classified very similar to inquiries. They have come to a point where they have said, 'I am interested in your content. I am going to like it or I'm going to follow you on Twitter, and therefore it is appropriate for you to send me this information through these channels.' So our goal here is to see an increase in these areas.

But the key is we've got to focus on our target audience here. Again, I'll go back to that Facebook page. When it's so very broad, it's very difficult for us to say a large amount of likes is something that's a value to us.

Right now, my university is, somehow somebody decided that it would be a great idea to have this rivalry with the University of Iowa on how many Facebook fans each of our universities can have. Meaningless statistic in the end. It's something that's basically generating the press release, is all that's doing, because we're not focusing this on a specific target audience. So we need to start digging into that data a little bit more.

 38:11

Now Facebook has recently created Facebook, well, they've always had Insights, but they're recently updated it, and it sucks a little bit less. But it still is actually pretty terrible.

But what they do give you is this nice Excel report that you can download, and inside that Excel report, they have tabs of all kinds of data, most of which is very similar to what you see here, but it's a little bit more in-depth.

And with data, we can start to look at our target markets, we can start to look at our age ranges here. Facebook has unfortunately not the best age range for us. I'd really like to see 16-18 as an age range. But the idea here is that we're going to start to look at that age range.

And then, cities. They report things by cities. So if we're looking out-of-state students, we've got to go through that list, comb through that list and figure out, 'OK, which cities are out-of-state?'

 39:01

Facebook has, for some reason, decided that you are only going to get a list of cities on your data report if it crosses a certain threshold. So I could have five people from Miami, but it might not ever show up on my Facebook Insights or even in that Excel report because Facebook doesn't think that's a value to you.

We don't need to look at raw numbers here. We don't need to count up the numbers. What we want to do is make sure that we are seeing a trend of those numbers going up. So I'm not comparing that number to anything other than the previous month. I just want to make sure things are going up in that situation. That's about all that means to me is that things are going up.

However, with click-through some content, we can now get a lot more information. And this is where something like Google Analytics comes in handy, and one of the rules I always say is, campaign-tag everything.

 40:01

If you are creating a link to come back to your website, use the campaign-tagging. With campaign-tagging inside Google Analytics, we can really associate our actions with our goals a lot simpler, a lot easier.

One of the examples I like to use is, if you are an admissions rep and you're doing a tour, and you're over at the Arts and Sciences college and one of your prospective students asks about the rec center, you as an admissions tour guide know that the rec center is going to be coming up next. You might not have the answer to his or her question, but you know when you get to the rec center that you're going to be able to find someone to answer that question. And right there you'll be able to say whether or not that question was answered and whether or not that individual was satisfied with the answer that he or she received.

Well, in a social media realm, again, remember these are digital manifestations of our conversations that are happening in the analog world, that same thing can happen. Jack could have a question about a rec center. He could post that on Twitter, he could post that on Facebook, wherever it might be, and you could, through your environmental analysis, funnel that, find that information, and answer it.

 41:15

A lot of times, your answer might require a URL, giving him or her a link to go find out some more content on your website. Well, if you just give a regular URL, you're never going to be able to know whether or not he clicked that URL to come back and get that question answered.

Furthermore, you're never going to be able to go and look and see if that question maybe helped lead to an application down the road, or helped lead to a submission of an inquiry form, or more content on our website that would help engage our user.

With campaign-tagging, we can do that. We can attribute certain actions to certain metrics inside our web analytics environment. So I would encourage you to look at campaign-tagging. Anytime you are putting a link out there, use it.

 42:05

Google Analytics also just recently released something called Real Time Analytics. I think Real Time Analytics has its place. There's a lot of debate on whether or not Real Time Analytics is good or necessary, with the idea being behind it is you're only going to make real time decisions with real time analytics.

But social media is a little bit different. Social media is very timely. In other words, all of our social media engagements are based off of a very short time frame, a time window. If you think about your Facebook news feed or your Twitter timeline, those are, if you are at the moment and you catch it, you got it. If you didn't catch it because it wasn't on that screen at that very second you are at it, you missed it.

So our goal with real time analytics is to be able to track whether or not we're hitting our metric sooner than we are later. In the traditional world, we might have to wait up until a day, and at that point we've probably lost our opportunity to fine-tune maybe some of our communication or anything along that line.

 43:11

Advanced segmenting inside Google Analytics will help us with tracking our social use. We can look at things like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. We can also look at our campaign sources. This is going to be how we aggregate all of our campaign sources together. And once we create an advanced segment inside Google Analytics, we can attribute that to any other action in our site.

So we can now look at something like our application. This is a canned report inside Google Analytics where I can look at all of my social media traffic and I can compare it to my online application whether or not my social media traffic is contributing to my online application.

Remember, my target is 4,500 applicants from out-of-state students. Right inside Google Analytics, I have the ability to segment my social media traffic, compare it to all my other traffic, add a layer of in-state versus out-of-state, and add whether or not those users went through the application stage or not.

 44:16

This is what I like to call the 'marketer's dream report'; with one analysis, we can quickly see those information.

Google Analytics' also new feature within the last few months is the multi-segment campaign analysis where I can see if my social media campaigns themselves, because I campaign-tagged them, played a part in turning the application at any given stage.

It used to be that you had to have a campaign, and that had to have been the first point of contact that you met this individual when they came to your website. Well, now we can look at it in any stage.

So our user could've come to our website from an email campaign, but they could also have then come back from a social media link that we might have sent him or her, and we can see how well that that attributed to our admissions application as well.

 45:07

My advice in all of this is a few steps.

One, find your strategy. Figure out how social media fits into that strategy.

Buddy up with your web analyst. Anybody that's doing social media probably is not the web analyst in your group, and anybody that's your web analyst in your group is probably not your social media person in your group, either. Figure out who those two people are and get together in the same room. A lot of this is going to go back and forth. Your web analyst is going to be help you get the Google Analytics insights that you're going to need out of it, help you with that campaign-tagging, and everything along those lines.

Set up your objectives and your targets. Remember, these are milestones, these are numbers for targets. How are we going to use social media is our objective.

Determine the metrics. There are lots of metrics out there, but they don't always make sense for every single approach that we need to take. We looked at that admissions metric example there. We didn't begin to look at Klout or we didn't begin to look at a lot of the other metrics that are available because they just didn't make sense in that current situation.

 46:18

Examine the measurement tools that are out there. This goes along with that. Measure.

And most importantly, take some actions from those insights. Figure out what we can do based off of what we found there. If we're seeing a decrease in our likes of our Facebook content, then it probably means we need to create better Facebook content, or it could mean that we need to focus more on strategies to get people aware of our Facebook content.

Maybe we need to figure out what time to post our Facebook content. Social media is a 24/7 tool. Most of us work 8 to 5. Our prospective high school students probably aren't using social media as much during the same hours that we're using social media at work. So look at things like that.

 47:07

Just because this is our back channel summary, we had a lot of great conversation. I'd like to see 198 tweets. What I can do now from these is go back and run this through sentiment analysis, and do some positive chatter amongst the group, which was my goal, and I can provide metrics to that.

So I'm going to look through these questions here. "How many schools use social media data in enrollment modeling?" I don't know of any that have used it to channel their enrollment modeling stages themselves. So far, I've seen used cases lurch around messaging and stuff like that.

What I think is going to be exciting is we're going to start to see universities, and this is something my university has started to dabble with, using internal social networks, which is going to bring in a whole new realm of metrics but using internal social networks for retention purposes, things like that.

 48:12

Again, what we're looking at is, currently all these things happening in our campus is social already. Now we can just use the tools online to make that a little more digital.

"Will the deck be available?" Good question. Right there. This is an HTML/CSS/Javascript slideshow. Somebody helped me with the foundation of that. Marco was the producer of that video. And that is where you can find the slides, not yet, because my wireless has choked on me when I tried to upload those. By the day of the end, things should be up there.

So with that, any other questions? Yeah.

Audience 2: How do... Yeah, I'll just repeat the question.

 49:01

Moderator: OK.

Audience 2: How do RSS feeds or other feeds from social media being piped into a page figure into any of your analytics? Or do you count that anyway?

Seth Meranda: Piped into a page that might already be on your site, for instance?

Audience 2: Already on your site. Does that have any bearing on how you look at your analytics?

Seth Meranda: Sure, sure. Again, I think that's very similar to what we can already measure, the difference being there is that it's already on our site. So we have to take a little bit of tweaks into that.

As they're being funneled in on our RSS feeds, we have to know maybe what page they're being funneled in on and adjust our Google Analytics. At that point, we're really looking at Google Analytic stages at that point, with the exception of some of the interactivity of Facebook, but we'll get that through Facebook Insights and stuff like that as well.

So look at Google Analytics, again, based on what page they're being funneled in. Yep. You bet.

 50:00

Any other questions? Yeah.

Audience 3: How do you go about starting, if you've never done the social media metrics, how would you start guessing at what your goals should be?

Seth Meranda: Well, I think goals are already going to be defined very similar to... I think you base them off of what your current goals of your strategy are.

So it's something like our enrollment thing. We have an enrollment goal set up, so what we want to do is we want to start looking at that trend, more or less. I would start by looking at that trend, and following that trend, and trying to increase maybe that trend over time. Maybe more of an exponential increase as opposed to a flat increase.

Audience 3: The increase to what our admissions goals are?

Seth Meranda: I'm sorry?

Audience 3: Percentage increase over what the admissions goals are?

Seth Meranda: I think that's a constant number that's going to be tweaked a little bit as you get through. I think that's going to be an exponential increase, keeping in mind some of the long tail stuff as well.

 51:01

So I'd sit with that, but I would start looking at your baseline already and then just start incremental increases over that as you get moving. As you start to get steam, you'll find that a lot more of these things are going to be a lot easier to quantify as well.

Moderator: All right, great. Thanks, Seth. Give Seth a round of applause.

[Applause]