Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Social media measurement class

Our next class will focus on social media impact measurement. We want to explore what information about social media interactions public managers might want to see that can help them support the mission of their organization. We will focus on tactics, techniques, and technological skills.


  1. In preparation for our class, please think about what the information is that you as a (future) public manager would like to receive to know that the resources invested in time and personnel make a difference to the public. In what format would you like to receive this information?
  2. As a public service employee charged with the use of social media on behalf of your organization, how would you prepare your business case to convince your superiors that social media helps to support the mission of your government organization?


As you prepare the readings for our class, please think about these issues and leave your questions here on the blog in the comment section to this update.

9 comments:

  1. I would be interested in discussing the "word-of-mouth" concept more fully-- the Hoffman & Fodor article did a good job of discussing how online word-of-mouth is related to offline word-of-mouth, but I was wondering if there has been any insight or research into how much offline chatter is captured online. In other words, how does the ability to collect statistics about online communication impact the value of trying to capture offline word-of-mouth buzz?

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  2. i think, a lot of efforts will be needed to introduce social media, in the work culture, where i am working. The issue is not only the usefulness of such media, the real issue is to implement and maintain it with proper spirit and with due consistency. I presume,change of mindset and focus for transparent governance essentially needs political support as well.-This is THE decision, which has greater impact from many angles, and without due process and home work,[preparedness] no one can move ahead. Each and every country has its own method of taking decision-in India, Judiciary has [in past]ruled out many administrative ideas so the things are there where it were, even after the years.
    Let me remain open and proactive in favor of social media-that certainly i will do.

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  3. As public manager and leader, i still want to know about the data management, archive management and how to overcome the security threats while using social web based technology?

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  4. what are the new medias still we have not discussed and what are their usages? when we are at present using traditional media and creating texts, picture, documentaries and all kind of audio visual, in this context how the tactics are differ except micro-blogging?

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  5. In the article 'Can you measure ROI of your social media marketing?', findings mention that instead of measuring traditional ROI on company's investment managers should assess customers motivation. Motivation as I understand is an abstract commodity which is :
    a. difficult to measure
    b. highly subjective and depends upon who is assessing it.

    I would like to know about the parameters which may be used for assessing consumers motivation.

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  6. Public agencies are not profit oriented and many of the services they provide are public goods (not likely to be supported by the market), so I'm wondering what would be the proposed returns, if not revenue? Here are some ideas: improving image/brand, participation of marginalized/minority populations, crowdsourcing issues/challenges, increased efficiency, receiving constituent feedback on service delivery, and identifying hubs in the network of a community.

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  7. As a public manager, to know that the resources invested in time and personnel have made a difference in engaging with the public, I would like to know not only how many citizens have visited the social media application but also why citizens have visited there and having reached there, what kind of interaction have they engaged in. Further it is useful to know what more information is demanded by citizens to improve the level of engagement. I would agree with the Hoffman article that the 4c's perspective of connection, creation, consumption and control leads to consumer-oriented framework for evaluating impact of social media.

    As a public service employee charged with the use of social media on behalf of my organization, to convince my superiors about the usefulness of social media, I would suggest that we devise a framework to evaluate the impact of social media applications, so that the return on investment gives an indication.

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  8. As we prepare our group project for this course my group mates and I have explored the need for metrics. I thought it might be useful in this venue to share what we learned. We found that there were three main principles that were important for helping our client understand the importance of metrics and developing a strategy that is practical and cost effective to implement.

    The first and most important principle was identifying the goals of using metrics (what we want to measure and why). These goals may be quantitative in nature such as increasing the number of followers, retweets, etc. These goals may also be qualitative such as understanding the effectiveness of volunteer recruitment efforts through social media, or assessing whether or not we are tapping into the right communities and conversations through social media. The most important thing is that the goals of using metrics should support the overall social media strategy and the overall goals of the organization.

    The second principle was identifying what the quantitative/technical solutions were for measuring these goals. Tools such as Klout give good quantitative feedback and helped us understand how pervasive the organization's social media presence is. However, we felt there was a qualitative aspect we needed to measure that these tools were not capable of delivering, which led to our third principle.

    Third, we explored the methods available for qualitative feedback on the social media strategy. This is how the organization is able to analyze whether or not they are achieving their broader organizational goals through social media. Specifically we discussed measuring social media tactics for recruiting more volunteers. By using entry/exit surveys and interviews we can understand the impact social media is having on bringing in more volunteers. Another issue was gauging whether or not we were engaging the communities we wanted to interact with through social media. Although there is value in knowing that our follower-ship went from 10 to 20 thousand the more important piece of information is knowing who the additional 10 thousand people are. We assume that there are a number of online and offline tools for capturing this information. Sampling blog-posts, twitter hashtags/retweets, and Facebook networks were some methods we discussed. However, at this point we are still exploring the potential methods for capturing this valuable information in ways that are practical and cost effective.

    We found that in order for metrics to be useful organizations must have a periodic review process where this information is analyzed and decisions are made. Even if the organization decides, based on the data, that they should not change their strategy that should be a conscious decision based on metrics.

    Hopefully you find this insight into our group's process of looking at metrics interesting and/or useful.

    Thank you,
    Don

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  9. In the article on Klout, the author has spoken about the Klout score of fourf leaders of the world and the TweetPsych. How can this information be of relevance to us as public administrators? And how should public administrators ensure that they are conveying the right message?
    Ritika

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