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. |
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] |