The online world is abuzz with talk about social networking. With companies such as Facebook seemingly constantly in the news, 2007 has been the year that social networking took its first adolescent steps beyond being the sole purview of, well, adolescents, and started to become a tool that is getting noticed in the business world. But with all the hype out there about online social networking, how can organizations begin to better understand the tangible business impact of their forays into this area?
The answer is not a simple one. For every organization, there will be a different set of metrics that are relevant, based on the unique traits of the organization and its goals. That said, there are a number of common ways that an organization can begin to measure the impact of social networking over time.
The first step, of course, is making the conscious effort to determine which metrics might be most valuable to the organization to help better manage its future activities. Metrics that measure the impact of a social networking effort are diverse, but can include factors such as:
- Size of network or number of "friends"—How large is a given social network?
- Depth of connections—What portion of the connections made via the network are substantive, rather than ephemeral?
- Participation—What portion of the network participates actively?
- Comments/conversation—How much "conversation" is taking place in the network?
- Invitations to others—Do members of the network reach out to invite others to join?
- Participant demographics—What are the demographics that make up the members of the network?
Key metrics
Friends
When social networking hit the media in a big way, it was on the shoulders of the consumer-focused social network MySpace. Brands jumped into MySpace with both feet, setting up profiles of their brand mascots (e.g., the Burger King), as well as setting up pages for thousands upon thousands of bands, movies and characters.
With MySpace, success seemed to be commonly measured by the number of "friends" that a given profile had amassed. For example, a MySpace profile for the movie Snakes on a Plane amassed over 25,000 friends in a short period of time. From a business perspective, what does the number of friends that a profile has on a social network mean? (Unfortunately for Snakes on a Plane, it didn't mean much. The movie was a disappointment at the box office.)
Fortunately, counting the number of friends isn't the only metric that can be used to attest to the health, reach and impact of a social networking initiative. Other, more substantive items, such as depth of connections, may perhaps give a better indication of a network's strength and influence.
Depth of connections
Any connection between two individuals has a particular level of depth. Have two individuals actually met face-to-face? Have they spoken on the phone? Have they attended conferences together? Do they have overlapping interests and affinities? Do they consider themselves to be friends in the "real world," or are they just online connections?
Measuring depth of connection can be done in a number of ways. It can be done systemically (e.g., how many times have these individuals been in the same place at the same time, how often do they exchange direct e-mails, etc.), or it can be self-reported (for example, an individual such as a sales representative could state that he and a prospect met face-to-face for lunch). Over time, depth of connection can be tracked for a population, and measurement can be done to see how many "connections" within the network move from being ephemeral to having traits of a real business relationship.
Participation
Participation is another key metric that can be tracked over time, quite easily in some cases. Not only can measurements such as how often a particular member of the network visits a particular site come into play, but more important, how often does that member contribute to the conversation? More contribution means more engagement, which means a tighter connection to the community. How many members have contributed to the community at least once? And how many were simply "drive-bys" who stopped by and moved on? Is the network doing everything it can to encourage members to contribute to its overall success?
Conversation
Moving beyond the individuals and looking at a group as a whole, another metric that can be of interest is the amount of "conversation" that takes place in the network. Once an individual contributes something to the network (a blog post, a video, a how-to tip, etc.), how widely does it engage the rest of the member base? Contributors with wide followings who can initiate dynamic conversations across a community may be the ones who wield the most influence in that community.
Invite others
Having an engaged membership in a social network is good. It gets better when those members start bringing others to the party. Any social networking system worth its salt needs to have an "invite others" feature. (That said, this facility needs to be implemented in such a way that members aren't incited to "spam" others to join the network, either explicitly or via tricks such as sending invitations that are supposedly from you to every member of your online address book.) Assuming the system implements this type of capability gracefully, noting the word-of-mouth pass-along and which members of the network are its greatest cheerleaders can be indicative of the overall connection between the network's sponsor and its community constituents.
Demographics
Finally, is it possible to measure the traits of the individuals who are joining a network? What are their interests, their backgrounds, their hobbies, their relevant industry experiences? Do those demographics match the typical demographics of the individuals who have historically interacted with an organization? Or are they skewing to a new market?
These are the early days for this industry. Organizations are beginning to realize that it's not just counting the number of friends in a network that matters but the quality of what goes on in the network that also contributes to business success.
