3 steps to choosing your social media metric vendor

I found a really good blog about measuring the value or ROI of public relations and a post on selecting your metric vendor. I think it will answer many of the questions people have about metrics.

I have turned the blog around into 3 steps with some sub-steps to condense the issues.

1 How much do you want to pay?

Crass question, I know, but you can think in terms of three price points: 0, 500-1000 pounds a month, or 5000-10000 pounds a month. That’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Where do you fall?

Cost is determined by three things:

a) The span of your metrics - how many products, services, issues, communities are you watching?

If you are a giant firm like Coca-Cola, you may need to research several languages and several markets because you implicitly compete with coffee, fruit juice and water, too. Most firms have a much narrower field of interest and will be tracking fewer issues.

b) What needs to be done?

Sometimes it is enough to get some machine-counted numbers and a standardized report. You may need to spend more if you need

c) Who will do the work?

The fee for work is calculated using the following factors:

If you are a very large company, you may need to pay for all this to coordinate the work, but you may be buying what consultants call a “transactional” service - the same service that everyone is getting.

The difficulty with hiring independent consultants is that you feel unclear about how good they are. Perhaps you should put that question to them squarely. I want to see if I can hire you, but I don’t know this business well. Can you walk me through the issues? What will you do? What should I be looking for? Where must I speak up and give you information? Where do you have difficulties with clients and what can I do to make the relationship work?

So that is cost:

2 What’s the business that we are we talking about?

People who deliver social media metrics are typically trawling the web in one way or another. Some claim to cover 30 million sites; some 10 million. The real question is: do they cover sites of interest to you?

And that begs the million-dollar question, which sites interest you.

This lovely blog I found suggests you should list the top 100 sites that concern your customers, and make sure your vendor already has them in their list! You also need to check you have covered all the relevant categories: sites, blogs, newspapers, platforms, microblogs, etc.

If you cannot list the top 100 sites that interest you, then that is where you need to begin.

3 What does you vendor do?

Most vendors of social media metrics are marketers. I don’t know these firms at all because I am on the supply side - HR and people particularly. It’s useful though to scan the list and think of how vendors differ from each other.

So those are the three questions:

People who are really expert at this, I am counting on you to question, correct, clarify and elaborate. For my part, I am interested in the supply side.

Does anyone out there work on the metrics of people offering companies goods and services?

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July 3, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan, Uncategorized 

Comments

2 Responses to “3 steps to choosing your social media metric vendor”

  1. Jo Jordan on July 3rd, 2008 1:53 pm

    I am leaving myself a comment so I am told when you do!

  2. Dan Thornton on July 3rd, 2008 2:01 pm

    Hi Jo,
    There’s a few other products and companies to list, such as Magpie’s Brandwatch…
    I seem to remember Jeremiah Owyang’s blog on Web Strategy has a pretty good list.

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