Measuring and monitoring a social media campaign

Social Media is no different from any other marketing activity for business in that it needs to be tracked and measured to ensure value against objectives. What is different, is both the style of the communications and the plethora of tools available to complete this tracking - many of which are still to be proven due to the relative infancy of the channel by comparison to more traditional media options.

That said, there is little forgiveness for its youthfulness and social media has to work harder to prove its value to most marketing professionals and certainly in order to demonstrate worth to CEOs and Boards. After all, social media is just a fad…isn’t it? Seriously though, we do face a number of challenges in proving the value of social media in terms of tracking organisations whose ultimate value measure lies offline.

Social Media allows us to have conversations - this as a means of communication is a much more complex channel to track as messages are two, or multi directional. Because of this, there is a need for these to be tracked both more frequently and using multiple approaches due to idiosyncrasies across social media platforms set ups and language.

Working with Tourism New South Wales on their ‘7 days in Sydney’ social media campaign, Daemon Digital worked much in the way that social media does when tracking outputs. We responded to what was happening, where shifts were made and what tools were best for the change in activity.

Whilst that might sound reactive, in fact we had set up a very structured outputs framework that married back against TNSW’s overall brand objectives and key messages. The strategy didn’t change, we just altered our game plan to glean the most detailed information.

In order to establish an overall brand perception, Daemon Digital first created a query framework and key word search against TNSW’s key messages run through a crawler system tracking over 6 million conversations of web chatter across blogs, wikis, forums and networks. From this, an eco-system of activity was created across each key message area to establish levels of activity and sentiment around these.

Using a combination of free tools, Daemon Digital established more specific trackers against the content creation from ‘7 Days in Sydney’ and the identity ‘Sydney Sider’. Blogs, microblogs, videos and engagement were tracked on a weekly basis, aggregated and expanded at specific points in the campaign to give greater insight.

The campaign itself is a success, with significant shift in the share of voice in social media from 22% to 39%. Ongoing measures are in place to track against the objective of increasing the number of travellers to Sydney by air ticket tracking and the number of nights in hotels.

For more on Daemon Digital and to view the case study http://ow.ly/LI1U

Post. CD