It’s probably feckless to talk about dashboards without showing any – so my last post was really just a preamble to this one. But that doesn’t mean that the concepts I talked about in my last post don’t matter. The 3C’s (Culling, Classification, and Context) are the underpinnings of effective social dashboarding.
Culling is the essential first step, the generation of a clean data set to be used for measurement. Ignore this step at your peril. Profiles setup by people whose job it is to monitor posts for PR problems and opportunities are NOT going to cut it when it comes to measurement and dashboarding. Classification provides the groupings that transform the raw metrics into categories appropriate for reporting. Context is the “spin” you put on the data – the way your dashboard relates the metrics to each other and to the broader business.
The dashboard examples I used in the webinar were drawn from multiple clients (and I fudged and obfuscated the data or used the initial mocks) – so they don’t necessarily represent a cohesive report set; I chose them because I thought they captured different aspects of the Classification and Context methods Scott and I discussed.I chose this first dashboard because of the way it took social metrics and integrated them into a broader funnel for the site. Using social metrics to help map the opportunity for a product or company is one of the most interesting uses of the data and a way to provide deeper context to your site metrics. Understanding the volume and share of conversation relative to actual site traffic (and subsequent conversion) gives a better sense of the whole pipeline:
We used three different metrics at the Opportunity level: Share of Voice, Share of Search, Share of Site. Share of Voice is the mention share for the brand relative to the entire competitive set. Share of Search is the search share for the brand terms relative to the set of competitive brands. Share of Site is measured from panel data and is the actual share of visits to the site compared to competitors.
This combination of three different “Share” metrics not only provides a deep sense of the bigger opportunity, it highlights possible gaps in the overall marketing effort. Where share of voice is much lower than share of search, direct marketing efforts may be outweighing branding. Where share of search isn’t keeping up with share of visits, the search program may not be adequately funded or operated. If share of visits lags the other metrics, the site may be a doing a poor job holding and engaging visitors.
People often say that Executive Dashboards need to be simple and have few numbers. I’m not sure I agree with that – the key is that numbers be at the appropriate level. A marketing executive may need to consume only 2-3 metrics per topic but needs to be able to see a view of many topics in relationship to each other. A broad funnel dashboard like this helps an Executive understand where the opportunities for improvement might lie.
This next report is one of my favorites because it illustrates a key point about social media dashboarding; using social measurement tools, you have the ability to measure your competition just as closely as you measure yourself:
If you’ve setup your social media profiles to track your brand mentions but not your competitors, you’ve missed out on many of the most interesting classifications and reports. Here, we track product line mentions for the client plus their three largest competitors. Then we trended the share metrics to show how specific brands were growing or losing share of voice. Next, we broke out the type of mentions (by topic) for each product line. These stacked bars make it easy to see how each product-line compares in terms of support threads, feature threads and pricing threads. Finally, we used the “word cloud” style but tweaked it a bit to show the words in each product-line cloud that are most different from the overall topic profile. This is a great representation of individual brand characteristics. Yes, this type of data can be collected with more rigor using primary research – but it can be done this way in near real-time and costs almost nothing.
In the web analytics world, I’m constantly being asked for benchmarks and site comparisons. Data that I often either can’t provide or don’t believe is truly comparable. In the social realm, this kind of tracking is eminently doable – it just takes investment in the proper culling and classification of information.
I picked this next report for two reasons – it uses a BUNCH of different sources to provide a high-level of overview of site and brand performance. This single dashboard integrated information from two web analytics tools (to get site, campaign and visitor segmented success), Radian6 to get social mention share for the client, the competition and the broader industry, Google Insights to get Search Share, Compete to get Site Visit Share, and primary research to get brand awareness. This plethora of sources is integrated into a framework that includes site success, market share, branding, and intra-site effectiveness.
I also like the simple, spatial representation of the “solar system” diagram to show how the company and target site compare to the broader competitive space and the overall industry:
This could just as easily have been shown in a bar or pie chart of course. But I think sometimes taking a purely spatial approach and abandoning the traditional charting styles makes for an easier and more visual presentation.
When you start thinking about using social media to understand the opportunity, you’re probably going to realize that there are other ways – possibly better ways – of getting at the same things. Here’s a report that uses panel data (of the sort you get from Hitwise or Quantcast) to understand visit share and upstream/downstream capture:
For this report, we identified the sites belonging to competitors as well as those which were classed as “neutral” – sites relevant to the industry but not owned or operated by a vendor. Using Hitwise, we then calculated the total visits to all sites – this is the complete opportunity. We then carved this up into the owned space, neutral space and competitive space. The rate of each to the total is the share.
In this case, we identified the sites that were neutral or competitive and visited AFTER our client’s site. These are visits lost. Reducing the # of visits that go downstream to competitors or industry sites is a clear goal for most web sites – just as a car dealer never wants a customer to walk off the lot.
This type of analysis is only possible with panel (or ISP) based data and it’s another great way to add powerful context to Executive Dashboards. As with so many of the presentations I’ve shown, to get to the interesting stuff we had to extract the data from the tool and classify the sites. Without the classification of sites, and the comparison of wins/losses, the data is just a list of site affinities – totally inappropriate for an Executive Dashboard.
Here’s a more tactical report that also underscores this point about classification. One of the most telling and important facts about any publication or influencer is what their key topics are – and how closely they match your own ideal “interest” profile. In the real world, influence is nearly always relative to specificity. The more precisely you understand a source’s interest, the better you can target your message to them.
This report profiles a set of influential sources by the degree to which they talk about each topic of interest – when we build this type of report we use indexicals for the bars. By including competitive terms, product terms, and key issues, you get a really nice overview of how each source is slanting.
From this type of classification and report to one that captures shifts in attitude and topic by source is just a save, a click and trend line away:
Here we calculated the affinity of each site to the target site (degree to which visitors are likely to visit both), the degree to which the source mentions the competition vs. the client (Us vs. Them) and whether or not the Us. Vs. Them rate has shifted positively or negatively. For good measure, we throw in the key topics most commonly mentioned on the site.
Getting to a report like this takes some significant work in classification, trending and logic. But it provides a great resource for understanding potential influencers, marketing targets and for measuring the effectiveness of PR efforts.
Putting in place real measurement of PR is a powerful addition to the Marketing Executive’s dashboard – and measuring actual shifts in influential pubs behavior is an excellent KPI for Public Relations performance.
The last dashboard I showed in the presentation wasn’t really a social dashboard at all. It’s a classic web analytics report designed to show the performance of various sourcing channels. So why did I include it? The web site is your hub for online – it’s a critical element in converting chatter and interest into action. So measuring the integration of social (and advertising) into the web site is part and parcel of good dashboarding. And hey, we are a web analytics consultancy!
Another really powerful feature here is that each channel is further broken down by visitor segment and visit type. The stacked bars below show the ratio of customers/prospects (the visitor segmentation) for that channel and the ratio of visit types (I used a sample of Early Stage, Potential Buyer, and Directed Buyer). This two-stage segmentation (Visitor and Visit Type) has become a fundamental part of our approach to web analytics reporting. And I use it here to show how you can quickly assess every aspect of social performance in driving to the hub – from volume to visitor segment breakdown to visit type breakdown.
Pretty cool.
In my next post, I’ll address the questions Scott and I got during the webinar – many of which were focused on the tools and methods I used to create these dashboards.
Hi Gary,
What a fantastic post. So thorough, and I especially like how you emphasize the additional context social data can provide to analytics. Layering these various metrics on top of one another, visualizing them appropriately and selecting the right metrics to show to the right people, is the absolute name of the data game. All these statistics tell a story about the effectiveness of your business (not just marketing or branding or customer service), and these dashboards are canvases that house that story. Great content here, and so glad to see Radian6 make it into the ranks.
Cheers,
Teresa
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Teresa Basich
Community Manager, Radian6
Posted by: Teresa Basich | August 24, 2010 at 01:39 PM