Social Sights

Measuring The Social: A Preview

If you’ve met me before, at some point in our conversation I probably mentioned the importance of engagement and how much value it is adding to the way we listen to our customers and understand what people care about most.

You might have also heard me talking about “measuring the social,” looking at the customers that are influencing through their engagement with social media, rather than just looking at those that post. This engagement is based on all the different ways someone can interact with content – posting it, sharing it, commenting on it, and more. Measuring your audience is no longer one-dimensional, it’s as multi-dimensional as the social sites you’re pulling data from.

Here’s a short video in which I break down the fundamentals:

Measuring the social really comes in handy when you look at advertising potential. Understanding the “silent majority” makes a huge impact on online advertising spend, especially when 85% of your customers are not vocal and posting. Advertisers want to reach their entire target audience, not just the 15% “vocal minority.”

In this second video, I talk about measuring the social for advertising, using game consoles as an example:

Earlier this week, Google launched into the in-game advertising space with the beta of AdSense for Games, joining a slew of competitors and validating the game ad market. In order to get the most relevant advertising to these game players, companies need to look at the type of content where there’s a lot of engagement and social action, in addition to posts and comments.

Over the next few weeks, we’re putting the social to the test. Networked Insights will be putting out a report that challenges some of the more traditional and outdated, yet still widely accepted, ways companies are going about understanding their audience. It’ll include data that I think shows Networked Insights’ technology and methodology is breathing some new life into these old and less relevant methods.

Stay tuned and you’ll see a new take on an ancient form of media measurement, though I must warn you, you may never look at audience measurement