A few weeks back I wrote a post about quantifying and measuring intangibles for Return on Investment (ROI) metrics (January 19, 2008, Measuring Intangibles – Making Impact the Bottom Line). The conversation got going based on a discussion about social media metrics with blogger Beth Kanter. I made the point that sometimes issues such as influence are not so easy to measure, but the impact is real nonetheless. I expressed my concern that businesses & nonprofits could miss opportunities because because they may find themselves unwilling to participate in activities that are not easily measured, but may otherwise prove beneficial. My conclusion to the thought was, “Focus on the mission, measure what you can, and the money will follow. Impact is the bottom line.”

However, lest anyone accuse me of throwing out metrics as a valuable and necessary tool for business development, I put together a short list of resources that shed light on measuring the impact of social media. As the saying goes, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” So any effort to better understand and quantify the impact of any strategic activity provides accountability and the benchmarks necessary to monitor progress. In fact, this is a key component that I include in all of the strategic planning that I do with my clients.

Here are a few of the resources that I have found useful in exploring the measurement of social media:

Latest Trend in Social Media: How to Listen Effectively and Engage in the Conversation
A free webinar archive featuring Senior Forrester Research Analyst Jeremiah Owyang and Glenn Fannick of Dow Jones has a great basic introduction to social media then gets into specifics of measurement.

This is one of the many resources provided by Owyang in a Social Media Measurement archive at his Web Strategy by Jeremiah blog. Tons of great stuff here.

Measuring Social Media Efforts
Social Media Consultant Chris Brogan takes a little different approach as he writes about mapping your social media activities to get a handle on the effectiveness of your efforts.

The ROI of Social Media
An article by Beth Kanter on The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) blog gives a good overview with lots of links and Beth’s typical thoughtfulness and depth on the topics she engages in. Her blog also has a wealth of info about social media ROI.

Measurement, ROI & Social Media
Blogger and ACDSee Community Manager Connie Bensen was part of a meme detailing her approach to using quantitative and qualitative metrics in measuring social media ROI. The meme was started by Geoff Livingston at The Buzz Bin blog and has lots of great insight from others who were tagged in the meme.

Ten Things to Know About Measuring Social Media
Marketing Consultant Larry Chase has an article in his Web Digest for Marketers written by web metrics expert Jim Sterne. This perspective comes at social media measurement from someone with a background in traditional web analytics. Many social media consultants feel that traditional web metrics are not that helpful when dealing with social media, but Sterne provides some useful insights that the social media pundits don’t tend to focus on.

A Not So Final Word…

Like social media itself, the measurement of it’s ROI is clearly evolving with the needs of it’s users. Would standards be helpful? Surely. But in the end, the organization doing the measuring has to determine what is most important to them. Whether you lean toward measuring hard numbers, e.g., subscribers, comments, links, etc., or influence and organic relationship building, an effective social media strategy is necessary for any organization seeking deeper engagement and interaction with it’s constituents. In business, selling widgets and building relationships are not mutually exclusive. But if you don’t have the relationships, who are you gonna sell your widgets to?

Feel free to add a comment with other resources on social media metrics & ROI that you have found helpful.

Can $10 bucks make a difference in the life of a child caught in slavery or poverty? The Case Foundation thinks so.

To prove it, the foundation is awarding a total of $750,000 through the Giving Challenge, an initiative designed to inspire greater philanthropy and introduce new ways to give through simple online technology. Case launched the two-pronged challenge in December by partnering with Parade Magazine to give $500,000, and with Causes on Facebook for $250,000.

The Giving Challenge is not about who raises the most money, but instead the awards will go to the charities and causes that draw the greatest number of unique donors. The minimum donation to qualify is only $10.

With less than two weeks to go in the Challenge, here are a couple of ways to help.

America’s Giving Challenge – Route Out of Poverty for Cambodian Children

The Sharing Foundation helps meet the physical, emotional, educational and medical needs of orphaned and seriously disadvantaged children in Cambodia. Thousands of Cambodian children grow up illiterate, with few educational options. The Sharing Foundation’s Khmer literacy school helps farm children learn their native alphabet and numbers well enough to attend elementary school. Its English Language Program offers village students, ages 8-18, the opportunity to learn Cambodia’s language of commerce, allowing them to obtain jobs in tourism and word processing. These students are so dedicated that some meet on their own to study on weekends

Here’s a video that blogger Beth Kanter did with her son about the project:

You can help Beth raise $50,000 by donating to this cause, and at the time of this post, that’s looking like a real likelihood.

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Not looking nearly as successful at this point is a cause I’m supporting on Facebook:

Causes Giving Challenge – Not For Sale Campaign to End Modern Day Slavery

Did you know that 27 Million people are enslaved today and that over 50% of them are children? Many are forced into hard labor or prostitution against their will. Not For Sale (NFS) is a campaign of individuals, musicians, artists, people of faith, businesses, schools and sports teams united to stop human trafficking. This drive will help 130 children, ages 4-17, all victims of human sex trafficking, build a new life. Funds will help to build a village for Tawainese abolitionist Kru Nam and her kids. The village, Buddies along the Roadside, will have five dormitories, an arts and education center, and plenty of land for the kids to grow their own crops. The village is now over half done, but Kru Nam needs to raise another $60,000 to complete the project.

Back when the Challenge began, I saw the posted item in Facebook about the Challenge from Steve Case. I contacted David Batstone, founder of NFS and author of the book of the same title about some ideas I had for Challenge. Unfortunately, he was in China at the time and I had pretty much given up doing anything when I heard back with only 16 days left in the challenge. There are a couple of NFS causes that were already in place, but to qualify for the challenge I had to create a new cause. So I put out a message to the creators of those causes and some NFS groups to promote the challenge cause. Apparently, there was some confusion with people donating to the original causes which don’t count for the challenge. Plus, when I sought to enlist the aid of 12 stellar social media Facebook friends, the overly lengthy message I sent didn’t show as sent and I ended up sending it three times! Ouch! Understandably, that didn’t go over too well. The last thing I want is a reputation as a spammer!

However…I’m not giving up! There are almost 8,000 supporters in the various NFS causes and groups on Facebook. If even 10% of those people donated to the cause, there would be more than enough unique donors to win the challenge. I’ve spread the word within Facebook without much movement and I think I know why. Causes is the most popular app on Facebook for fundraising because it’s so easy for anyone to start a cause. This means that there can be hundreds of causes with only three or four people supporting them, including duplicates of the same cause. And just because they join the cause doesn’t mean they donate to it. It’s a great concept, but it seems like most Causes I’ve seen in the past have raised very little support. I think people associate with a cause because they want to say something about their own identity, but up until now it doesn’t seem like any major fundraising has been going on. The Challenge does appear to be changing that.

So my question is this: If Facebook is a “walled garden”, how viable is it to create a non-profit fundraising presence within the walls, and then motivate people outside the walls to come in to check it out? In other words, what would happen if enough people are motivated through other social media channels outside of Facebook to check it out? Could Not for Sale could still come from behind to win the Challenge?

My humble request to you is, would you be willing to help spread the word about this Cause and the Challenge? Blog about it, Twitter it & encourage others to do the same. I think it would make a great experiment and who knows? Maybe we can sweep in from out of nowhere and get enough buzz going to vault Not For Sale to the top to win the Challenge. What do you think? How about $10 to Beth’s cause outside Facebook, and $10 to my cause inside Facebook. Poverty AND slavery dealt a blow with a click. Donate here.

While checking in at Facebook the other day, I got into an interesting dialog with Social Media Consultant Beth Kanter. Beth is also a professional blogger and writes about the use of social media tools in the nonprofit sector for social change. I saw a status update that said “Beth Looking for resources and info about ROI and Tech.” Earlier, I had read her blog post about measuring return on investment (ROI) for intangibles where “love” was used as a tongue in cheek example. So I zipped off a link to a white paper recommended by Chris Brogan called Distributed Influence: Quantifying the Impact of Social Media from the PR firm Edelman.

After getting the link, Beth asked, “What piece of information or insight in this report struck you most? What was the most important learning?” This was my reply:

“I think what struck me most was just the whole idea conceptually of quantifying and measuring an intangible like influence. While I recognize the importance of measurable objectives, I have always had a problem forcing something that is organic by nature into a mechanical straightjacket. I mean, they’re not called “intangibles” for nuthin’!

That said, I realize the importance of discussing ways to measure intangibles. I appreciated this insight from Peter Kim that influence and attention are different. He said that influence is fiscal and long term whereas attention is monetary and short term, and I agree with that. Clicks and page views don’t tell the whole story. Influence is about IMPACT.”

As far as the most important learning, I think Jeff Jarvis and Keith O’Brien made similar statements that it matters WHO we are talking to not how many. Not just who is influential, but who is carrying the conversation, those who are more easily influenced. This includes understanding and possibly even tailoring the message to the influencers, the spreaders, adapters, commentators and readers.”

After Beth posted some of my comments on her blog, I got to thinking a little more about my reply and why I said what I did. Back when I was a community outreach point person at REI, one of the things that I discovered was that the connection between the outreach activity and the bottom line was not that clear, but that the impact was obvious.

We had an educational program that taught basic outdoor skills to customers to introduce them to activities like rock climbing, backpacking, canoeing, cross-country skiing and bicycle maintenance. The idea is, you inexpensively educate your customers on the use of the products you sell and they will want to buy from you, right? One of the classes that always did very well was a course on avalanche awareness. This is an essential skill for people wanting to cross-country and telemark ski in the backcounty, and we often found many beginners taking this course. For a nominal fee, they got a book, an in-store session, and a field session in the mountains with avalanche beacon rental. Now the cost to get outfitted to backcountry ski ($300 -$400 for skis, boots & poles, $200 for beacon, maybe another $100 to $200 in clothing) starts to add up. To measure the effectiveness of our programs, we would track the purchases of each participant in the class for one week before the class and four weeks after the class to determine the associated sales. Though we could not make a direct connection between their involvement in the class and their purchases, it was obvious that the class was having impact because we could see the spike in their buying history.

However, many questions arise when you cannot make a direct metrical correlation between a marketing activity and a purchase. Did they, in fact, buy those skis, or that beacon because they took the class? Would they have bought them anyway? How can we prove definitively, with precise data that the class influenced their decision to buy? The answer, of course is that you can’t. It is only by inference that the class impacted their purchase. And was always clear that it did.

So what does all this mean for marketers, advertisers, and in particular, mission driven organizations? Has the issue of measuring intangibles changed for them with the advent of the internet with it’s clicks and page views? Should they avoid engaging in certain activities, such as social media, because they are not easily quantifiable? Should they only embrace initiatives that can be measured out of fear of not being able to prove their value? That would not only be ridiculous, but it would be bad business. REI’s educational outreach program is the right thing to do. They are educating their members and customers in the safe and environmentally responsible use of the gear that they sell. And they sell a LOT of gear. You gotta make money, but doing the right thing cannot always be measured in dollars and cents. Focus on the mission, measure what you can, and the money will follow. Impact is the bottom line.