For anyone who is looking for a solid primer on social media within corporations, though, those two words perfectly describe Christopher Barger’s book The Social Media Strategist: Build a Successful Program from the Inside Out.

In case you aren’t familiar with Barger, he’s headed-up social media at two of the world’s largest companies – IBM and GM. While at the latter, he led their social media communications around GM’s bankruptcy filing. Suffice to say, he has the chops to write a book about corporate social media. Nowadays he plies his trade at Voce Communications.

Despite the over-abundance of social media books nowadays, you can generally divide them into twocategories: the inspirational, philosophy-level books (Trust Agents, Six Pixels etc) and the practical, action-focused books (ok, there are probably many more, but work with me on this…). The Social Media Strategist falls firmly into the second category – one that I think is very thin on the ground right now – and immediately takes its place as my pick for one of the best in the category.

Barger writes in a pragmatic, realistic style – he doesn’t pull any punches, but more importantly he doesn’t focus on shiny objects and he doesn’t bullshit you with visions of a social media-driven utopia. He’s honest and to the point about challenges, and this book is all the better for it.

Barger gives a nod towards social media 101s, but this book is intended for people who have already bought-in to the potential of social media, and are looking for the “how”, not the “why”.

The vast majority of the book is taken up with chapters on critical pieces of the corporate social media puzzle – roles, responsibilities and key infrastructure. Barger leads with substance – early chapters on the executive champion, the social media lead, and the challenges they need to overcome are some of the best parts of the book. Later on he delves into aspects of social media training, policies, crisis management, blogger relations and more.

One key point to note is that this is not a tactical “how to” for social media programs, or a case study-focused book. You won’t learn from detailed walk-throughs, and case studies are limited to comments from a few key individuals in the space (all of whom are highly credible, however). This book is focused at more of a strategic and structural level.

Equally, if you’re already a long way down the road with your program then you may get relatively little from this (although there will certainly be nuggets and reminders throughout) – this is focused more on someone starting from close to scratch.

Neither of these things is a problem, though – Barger knows who he is writing for (he states it explicitly at the outset, in fact) and he caters to that audience with aplomb.

If there were one thing I could change, it would be the flow through the book. There’s no narrative through the book – partially because Barger doesn’t prescribe a set process to follow, but at times the leaps from topic to topic between chapters could use finessing (while chapter 9 focuses on social media training within the organization, chapter 10 focuses on blogger relations). Also, the crisis communications chapters have relatively little substance when it comes to how to prepare for those events (the GM-focused chapter, alone, could frankly be a book on its own).

Ultimately, if you’re working on social media within an organization and need a handbook as you get started, I can hardly recommend The Social Media Strategist more strongly. I’ve already suggested that several people I know read it, and suspect that several others may find it in their stockings next time Christmas rolls around.

Two thumbs way up.

We started preparing for the inevitable rollout of Timelines months ago when it was launched for developers’ personal pages back in October. At the time we’d pulled together our own five-step prescription for preparing your timeline:

1. Review company marketing/communication materials and history:
2. Plot out the story you want to tell and the milestones for it
3. Identify appropriate engagements to feature
4. Identify approach to contentious issues
5. Determine appropriate cover image

One aspect of the new system – the potential for issues – doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of attention. Here’s what we didn’t realize back in October:

The Timeline you see on a brand page is personalized by your friends’ actions.

See that circled post? That’s from Liam Lahey – a friend of mine, who posted a link that mentioned Obama in the descriptor text. The previous time I went to the page, it showed a link from Tara Hunt – another friend who had posted something mentioning Obama.

So, while curation is absolutely important, and companies should think about the story they need to tell, they also need to recognize that brands don’t control everything that people see on their Timelines.  That means, even though you’ve curated your timeline carefully anything that someone has posted about your brand could show up, and what does show up changes dynamically.

While this could be a positive thing, it’s also going to give brands migraines:

1. It could point a renewed spotlight at issues that you wish would go away.
2. It provides the potential for new issues to get greater attention due to the greater visibility given to Timeline posts.

What does that mean for you as a communicator?

From my perspective, it means that your community management, monitoring and measurement folks are now your best friend.

Community management, because as a brand you need to be watching the activity on your page and watching for spikes in attention.

Monitoring, because conversations could easily shift from your Facebook page to other online channels (blogs, forums, Twitter, etc).

Measurement, because you should be watching for spikes in traffic to old content (especially issues/crisis-focused content) and the resulting patterns that emerge.

In short, the launch of Facebook Timelines for your brand means you need to integrate. More thinking coming on that soon.

How so, you ask? Let’s start by

A marketer’s journey on Facebook: from engagement to advertising

Facebook has a saying that, “this journey is 1% finished.” Following that mantra, if you look at the changes Facebook has made over the last year as a continuum, the company has significantly tilted the scales away from engaging content – from brands creating communities with their customers – and towards paid advertising.

There’s nothing new in the fact that the vast majority of user/brand interactions come through the news feed.  The fact is that few people actually visit your page on an ongoing basis – even those who do visit once, rarely do again. For that reason, capturing peoples’ “likes” at that time has been critical for a while, so companies can continue to interact with people in their newsfeeds. This, on its own, means that anything Facebook does that affects content is hugely significant for marketers.

Mid-way through 2011, the company changed its approach to determining what people saw in their newsfeeds, with the result that the number of people seeing posts from brands dropped significantly – by up to 75%, in fact. While many marketers may be focused on the nice shiny number of total “likes” they have, the reality is that brands’ posts are only seen by a small minority of their fans.

Sound crazy? While impressions/reach aren’t publicly visible numbers, Fangager put out an analysis of the “100 most engaging brands on Facebook” late last year, showing that even the engaging brands generally had between 0.3% and 2% “active fans”. Here’s the top ten:

Disclosure: several of these brands are Edelman clients

The average percentage of ‘active fans’ in the top ten most engaging brands is 1.5%. If you go by the maxim that 1% of people create content; 9% comment and 90% lurk, those numbers multiply up to roughly 16% of people seeing these brands’ content (consistent with the numbers that Facebook discussed at their fMC event last week..

I’ll say that again – even if you’re on the high end of the scale, only one in five fans of your Page will see your content.

Enter Facebook’s new advertising products. Distilled down to two points, the latest advertising announcements from Facebook are:

• Putting Page content as a core component of Facebook Ads
• Allowing you to reach more fans through the “Reach Generator“

Simply put, Facebook first degraded brand content over the last year, and has now released a advertising products to let companies pay to offset the changes they’ve made.

Let’s think about this in terms of customer touchpoints. Before the latest round of changes, if you set aside the Open Graph there were four primary ways to proactively reach your company’s fans on Facebook:

1. Content (proactive and engagement-focused)
2. Paid advertising
3. Creative assets (via tabs)
4. Apps

While agencies made money from all of the above, Facebook only made money off one of those. Combined with the new Timeline for brands, Facebook in one fell swoop has both expanded the overlap of advertising with content, and has reduced the impact of other creative assets (for example, you can no longer direct people to a default tab other than your wall) in one fell swoop.

Implications of Facebook’s advertising changes

I’m not saying these changes from Facebook are a bad thing. Regardless, we can’t exactly blame Facebook for making them – Facebook is a business and, as much as users may like it, engaging content on its own doesn’t generate revenue for the business.

Still, companies (and community managers) do need to pay attention. Here’s what I think we’re likely to see:

1. Staffing – community managers/analysts: Companies will need to apply new rigor to their content to optimize its performance in Facebook’s new ad products. While the more socially-advanced companies with significant investments are already doing this, this will become important for all companies with paid investments in Facebook. For those with smaller social media teams, that means community managers will find that stats and analysis are even more important skillsets, and that partnership with measurement teams is critical.
2. Processes – integration and an “and, not or” approach: Success in this new Facebook will depend on even tighter integration between community managers, content teams and paid media in order to find the right balance of engagement, business results-driven content and advertising.
3. Users – seeing more push-focused content:Yes, companies could promote engagement-focused content, but given that brands will be measuring the effectiveness of their advertising in driving business results, and weighing the opportunity cost of increased Facebook investment against other paid media, users are likely to see more push-focused posts with a clear call to action being published by brands for this purpose.
4. Lazy – some companies go the paid route: Some companies will choose to take the easy route out. Rather than optimizing their content to increase engagement in order to drive reach, they’ll simply choose to go the paid route, investing in reach generator and the new premium ads to increase the visibility of their content. Whether this will be cost-effective remains to be seen.

That is, except in Canada.

Results of the 2012 Canadian Trust Barometer

Today we announced the Canadian results of the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer at an event in Toronto. A few highlights from the Canadian survey:

• “A person like me” and regular employees both saw the biggest increase in trust in Canadian Barometer history. “A person like me” in particular has re-emerged as one of the four most trusted spokespeople behind academics and technical experts.
• Trust in social media increased by 175 per cent in Canada, and trust in other online sources rose by 20 per cent. These increases are consistent – but larger – with those in the US.
• CEOs are now the least credible spokespeople in Canada. While trust in business as an institution remained steady, business is not meeting the public’s expectations when it comes to building trust in companies.
• Unlike in other countries, trust in media remains steady; in fact it was the only institution to see trust rise in the last year in Canada; possibly partly because the definition of “media” is changing and because the media is beginning to be seen as leaders in breaking news, rather than followers in reporting it.

Implications for Social Media

So what do this year’s results mean for companies in Canada, and those using social media in particular? Here are four social media implications from the results of the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer.

1. Transmedia storytelling is critical

The continuing rise of trust in social media and online sources is a clear signal that companies need to think beyond text when it comes to communicating. However, trust also increased in the Canadian media (and remains higher than other sources) – a signal that proclamations of the end of traditional media were very much premature.

Companies need to consider the complete media cloverleaf – traditional, owned, social and hybrid media, and to use them together effectively in order to communicate effectively.

2. Social media is not the end goal

While trust in social media has increased, and in Canada has more than doubled, it still lags well behind that of other sources. However, trust in “a person like me” is through the roof. There’s a dichotomy here, quite possibly because “social media” means different things to different people – plenty of people think of Twitter as a bunch of people talking about their lunch; I think of it as my industry peers discussing trends (and the occasional LOLcat).

The dichotomy of trust in social media means we can’t think of social for its own sake. Gaining new fans on your Facebook page, or followers of your Twitter account, won’t solve your business problems. Companies with a primary social goal of adding new fans/followers, or of gaining views on a video, are missing the point. To drop a cheesy line, it’s not the size of your community but what you do with it that counts.

3. Use social media as a conduit and a connector

If trust in social media, although on the rise, is still low, what does that mean for us? It means we need to think of it as a conduit rather than a destination.

Just as search engines are a conduit to useful information, social media is a conduit to connecting with other people – both those inside the company (e.g. regular employees) and to “people like you.” As a starting point, stop thinking about social media in the same way you think of traditional marketing campaigns, and start thinking in terms of bringing people together around a common interest. However, that’s just the beginning. What do you do with (and for) them? What do you enable from that point forward?

4. Enable and amplify advocacy

Experts and “people like me” are among the most trusted sources of information. One of the most interesting uses of social media is in enabling and amplifying the advocates of your company. Become the enabler – provide your organization’s fans with the information they need to speak in an informed way about the things they’re passionate about, and provide them with the opportunity to do so. The recent partnership between Bazaarvoice and Buddy Media is a great example of a key piece of this puzzle.

Also posted on the Edelman Canada site.

CES is not a social media conference (duh)

CES is, first and foremost, an electronics show. It attracts a very different audience compared to conferences like SXSW or BlogWorld. While those social-focused conferences are fertile ground when it comes to social media programs, CES is full of salespeople and executives who, generally speaking, are less socially-savvy than conferences in the social media bubble.

I spoke to a rep at one booth who was giving away high-value prizes to followers who showed up at the booth and showed them promotion-related tweets on their phone; they said it took an hour for the first person to approach them the last time they ran their promotion.

That doesn’t mean there’s no place for social media, though – far from it.

Raise awareness ahead of the event

If your company is attending CES, take the opportunity to create awareness of where you’ll be and what you have to offer ahead of time, both through public channels (e.g. your blog, Twitter, Facebook etc) but also by mining your databases for people and companies that you want to connect with at the event and seeting-up meetings with them ahead of time.

Create and amplify content for non-attendees

CES is full of cutting-edge new technology. If your company is there showcasing their products or announcements, take advantage of that to create content for non-attendees:

• Go behind the scenes on your booth
• Go in-depth on your products
• Get reactions from show attendees on camera
• Get interviews with partners

CES can be a content goldmine if you approach it correctly.

Remember that other people are creating content, too

You’re not the only one thinking about content generation at CES. The world’s tech media, from traditional to hybrid to social, gather in Vegas for this event. There’s content being generated constantly. That means you need to be on your game – you need to treat everyone you speak to as though they’re a journalist (because they could be), and you need to watch your words because you never know who could be walking by.

Listen and learn

With the amount of content generation – and subsequent online discussion – that goes on, social media monitoring can be a goldmine of insights (and issues management). Makes sure you pay close attention to the conversation surrounding your brand and its competitors – not from a superficial “ooh there’s a pretty chart” perspective but from one of driving and optimizing your content calendar throughout and beyond the event, and from one of bringing product-focused insights back to the business.

Plan your visit using social media

With over 3,100 exhibitors and over 153,000 attendees in 2012, planning your schedule at CES can be overwhelming. Take some of the stress out of it by leveraging social media tools to help plan your visit:

• Use tools like TripIt and Plancast to see which of your contacts/leads/key vendors will be in town for the event
• Use LinkedIn to identify key people from the companies you want to connect with, and reach out to them ahead of the show
• Use Foursquare to see where your connections are during the event (although, as mentioned, this can be less effective than at events like SXSW where Foursquare becomes central to staying on top of what’s going on

Create meetups to connect with influencers

While you may find that throwing a fan event at CES is tougher than at other events, the top tier of tech influencers is in town. Tailor your approach to throwing events to this audience – give them a reason to come along (exclusive access to company insiders, or exclusive information, for example) and differentiate your event from the masses. Remember, most people will be triple-booked most nights so you need to stand out (and not just by throwing the biggest party).

Social media can (and clearly does) have a very important place at events like CES, but it’s very different from social media-focused events like SXSW – you need to think differently, and you need to execute differently.

What do you think?

These aren’t necessarily trends that are already happening (although I’d like to say they are), but they’re certainly where my head is at and hopefully where others are, too.

Here are six shifts I hope to see in social media use by business in 2012.

Better objective-setting

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a slow maturation in the way companies develop their objectives for social media. My hope is that this will continue in 2012. That means fewer companies treating fan or follower growth or video views as goals, fewer made-up numbers and more focusing on business outcomes – sales, cost savings, customer/employee retention etc.

More effective measurement

As companies get better at setting objectives for social media, they’re going to need to get better at measuring against those new objectives. That means shifting focus away from  anecdotal evidence and simple outputs, and looking at indicators of the behaviour you’re looking to drive. It also means taking a closer look at the reporting of that measurement. See my recent post on five ways to improve your social media measurement for more on this.

This will be accompanied by increased realism over social media results. I’m currently reading a book that points to a multi-national company having 27,000 Twitter followers as an indication of social media success. Let’s face it, that’s unlikely to move the needle for lots of companies. As companies focus-in on reporting business objectives, we’ll see a continued shift away from high-fives over anecdotes and minor wins and a more hard-nosed focus on what really matters.

Improved Integration

Key to measuring more effectively, but with far, far broader effects, integration (and the breaking down of silos) will become even more key in 2012. The smart organizations have already figured out that social media works best when supported, and supporting, other forms of communications; look for more companies to mandate a silo-busting approach over the next year.

Strategic content planning

As organizations increasingly adopt the role of media companies in their online communications, watch for content strategy to receive greater focus in 2012. That means shifting from a “we have to fill these content slots” approach to one that carefully considers the objectives of each piece of proactive content and why it deserves its place in the content calendar. Sometimes it might be to drive community engagement; other times it might be to drive business conversion, and so on.

Increased search focus

An increased (and improved) search focus sits alongside more strategic planning of content. It means broadening the scope of how you target content, from point-in-time to point-in-lifecycle – thinking about what people are looking for at their stage in whatever process you’re targeting, and helping them through that and on to the next stage. That could be a stage of the purchase cycle, it could be a stage of the support process, or any number of others that you choose to focus on (thinking back to objectives).

Focusing on the less-shiny object

This is a big bucket of all sorts of increases, but my hope is that as companies move away from shiny-object snydrome in 2012 they start to take a more sophisticated approach to the less-shiny objects – policies, processes, listening, crisis plans etc – or, more formally put, to social business.

For me, this is an exciting time. I’m jazzed to see more mature use of social media help it to evolve into a more powerful tool for organizations – “life after likes“, as David Armano puts it. This is the cool stuff – the stuff that will move the needle and add real value for companies.

That makes the non-shiny objects the shiny ones for me.

If you’ve worked in the social media space, that seems like a pretty straightforward “yes”, right? I mean, we’re always talking about how listening and responding is critical.

What if we ask the question a couple of other ways:

Should you always let conversations in social media direct your business?

Should you let individual conversations in social media direct your business?

The answer isn’t quite as simple now, is it? All of a sudden, we’re facing potential (hypothetical) situations where, every time someone doesn’t like something, you change things around to make them happy, or where a single outspoken voice gets priority over a potential majority who could want something else.

All of this goes to say that while listening is central to social business, you need to frame the decisions you make based on that listening appropriately.

Let’s take two examples:

Customer Support

I’m of the general mindset that you should try to help every customer who needs support (you don’t tell your call centre not to answer calls from certain customers, do you?). But what about when a customer asks for something that, if applied to everyone who asked, just wouldn’t be feasible? Do you change your company’s approach based on one person’s request?

If you’re a B2B company with only a few major customers, then perhaps you do.

If you’re a B2C company with hundreds, thousands or millions of customers, though, then probably not – you’d end up bankrupting your company.

Product and Service Insights

Let’s say you’ve got your listening program set up. Do you listen to each individual opinion that is out there on the web?

Of course not. You’d end up constantly in reactive mode, responding to customer “insights” with no overarching strategy and no ability to plan for the future.

Approach Insights Strategically

I think the time where large companies will begin to take a more strategic approach to leveraging social media for insights is fast approaching. Note: I’m not talking about losing the human touch when it comes to interacting with people, and I’m not talking about removing flexibility from front-line social media staff, but more in how companies approach distilling social media conversations into useable takeaways.

Take Insights in Aggregate

When my team tells me that “there’s a lot of conversation online” about topic X, my first response nowadays is “how much”? If the answer is just a few mentions, then my response is to keep monitoring, see if things escalate and begin to prepare in case they do. If the answer is “hundreds” or “thousands” of conversations, then we know we need to react immediately.

The same applies to mining for insights. Taking individual pieces of feedback can be useful for illustrative purposes, but unless you’re just looking for ideas to inspire (or to pass the hours and hours of free time you clearly have), you need to step up a level and identify the key trends.

Test Your Assumptions

Tom Webster gave a great presentation at BlogWorld recently where he talked about the need to “do your own work.” In this context, it means not just assuming that something you’ve gleaned from other people is correct – you need to test it for your business.

Tom also made the great point that social media are themselves a biased source of data, so to be sure of your insights, you need to test them outside social media.

What does this mean? It means that you need to move from shift from reacting to customer feedback to testing to ensure that the reaction to those reactions would benefit your business. Of course, once you implement changes subsequently, you should be monitoring for the reaction to those changes, developing more insights, testing… and so on.

My hope is that the time of the “let’s all sit around a campfire and pretend that businesses need to respond to every single piece of feedback” people is coming to an end, and that the time for strategic insights is upon us. Some social media practitioners are ready for this; others aren’t.

Ask yourself: where do you sit?

Last week I spoke on a roundtable on Practical Social Media Goal Setting, Measurement and ROI, along with Janet Fouts, Steve Farnsworth and Brian Rice. One of the most interesting questions asked related to the mistakes that organizations make around measuring social media. Rather than focus on those mistakes, here are five ways to avoid them – five ways to improve your social media measurement and reporting.

1. Focus on outcomes over outputs

The number of Tweets you post, or replies you generate, may be interesting, but what value do they drive? Instead, focus on the outcomes of those activities – how many leads did you generate? How much money did you save? How many event registrations did you drive?

It can sometimes be hard to accomplish this – especially from the agency side – as you often need to work with many business functions to determine this (sales, IT, marketing etc). The more you can push in this direction, though, the better off you’ll be.

2. Set measurable objectives

Measurement factors into SMART goals in several ways.

Firstly, considering insights from previous activities (previous reporting periods or previous campaigns) to set appropriate expectations for the time-period set.

Secondly, ensuring that the objectives that are set are measurable so you can measure the ultimate success or failure of your program at the end.

3. Determine the purpose of your report

I’ve seen way too many reports that lay out the objectives of a program, then report on measurements that have nothing to do with those objectives.

If you’re looking to get ten thousand sign-ups to a new service, why would you report on the number of retweets of your content? Or the sentiment of coverage? Those numbers have value when you’re looking for ways to optimize your activities, but when it comes to measuring against your objectives, the connection there is weak at best.

Before you begin working on a measurement report, determine what the purpose of that report is. Is it to optimize content? Provide insights to fuel products, services, messaging, etc? Or to determine the success of a program? Determine the purpose of your measurement and tailor your approach to it.

The audience of your report is often tied closely to its purpose. Who are you writing for? The answer to that question – whether it’s community managers or senior executives – should determine the kind of insights you provide.

Check out Jeremiah Owyang’s great post on the social media ROI  pyramid for a great way of thinking about this.

4. Focus on driving action

Number soup doesn’t help anyone. To make your reporting valuable, make sure you seek to drive insights and action with what you report. To quote Rob Clark, look not just at the “what”, but the “so what” and the “now what”.

5. Measure before, during and after

The measurement process doesn’t start at the end of a project; it starts at the beginning, with setting your objectives, and continues throughout the work. Measurement, done right, fuels your objectives, sets a baseline against which you can measure, enables course adjustments during the activities and measures against your objectives at the end.

Doing these things won’t make measuring your activities any easier, but it will make your measurement and reporting more effective, and will help you to improve your social media activities over the long run. That may not be shiny and glamorous, but it’s effective and valuable.

(Image credit: Jeremiah Owyang)

What is this metric, you ask? To quote the post:

“Divide the total revenue generated via social efforts by the number of social media fans and followers, and you get a per-fan/follower value.”

There you have it – your “new” ROI – return on influence.
Really? Looks to me like that’s “Revenue Per Fan/Follower”.

Sorry, but this kind of black-hat math just doesn’t cut it. There are so many holes in the post, it’s hard to know where to begin (fortunately, Olivier Blanchard and Katie Paine did, in the comments). Still, I’ll take a stab, because I think it’s important that you, me and everyone in this space stop using BS metrics to justify social media activities and start to tie them back to business objectives.

I’ve written on this before (check out this post from two years ago) but here we go again…

1. Measuring a return requires that you compare outcomes to the input

How can you calculate a return on something without knowing what you put into it? My head hurts. This isn’t a true “return” metric; this is a poor attempt to calculate the value of a fan (without considering many of the factors in play even in that instance).

2. ROI is ROI, not Return on Imaginary Numbers

ROI has a formula. It goes like this:

(Gain from investment – cost of investment) / cost of investment

This isn’t up for negotiation. It’s a business staple. Please – if you value your job – don’t walk into a boardroom and try to sell your CFO on your fan numbers. Don’t try to sell them on retweets, or replies, or anything like that (they’re useful, but not in that context or for that audience). Show them the return that you’re able to generate for the business.

It might be hard to tie social media activities directly back to ROI, as there’s rarely a direct, solid line to be drawn (it’s extremely hard to say what, beyond the final trigger, influenced a decision to purchase, for example, but it doesn’t mean those things weren’t worthwhile). However, solid business objectives do tie back.

Which leads me to the next point…

3. Return on Influence has nothing to do with business objectives

This is something I’ve been putting a lot of thought into recently – ensuring that the social media activities we plan tie back to business objectives for our clients. Sometimes that’s sales. Sometimes that’s reduced customer churn. Sometimes it’s lowered costs.

It’s never “increasing the revenue per follower” or the “return on influence”.

 4. Measurement should be activity-specific

Imagine going pitching a metric like “return on PR”. The conversation might go something like:

You: “We calculate Return on PR by looking at the revenue generated from PR against the volume of releases we put out…”

Boss: “Get out.”

This idea is similarly ridiculous. Measure an activity, not a medium. You want to measure the ROI of a tweet? Fine. Figure out what it cost to draft/approve/publish it (time is money) and how much revenue it generated (assuming it was sales-focused). There you go – you can calculate the ROI of the tweet, and you haven’t broken a sweat yet.

Don’t try to measure the ROI of social media, or of “influence”… please.

5. Followers and fans don’t define influence

Every time someone uses reach metrics to try to define influence, a great hue and cry goes up. “It’s not reach, it’s context!” they cry. It’s true. Plus it’s a bunch of other things.

Folks like the team at Traackr have realized this, as have those at PeerIndex. Klout has cottoned-on, too, with its topic pages (although I’d still like to see them go much further down that road).

If you measure your results based on fans and followers, don’t expect senior leadership to buy into your plans for long.

6. Please – PLEASE – stop creating fake numbers

Like Ad Value Equivalency (AVE), this number tries to force a square peg through a round hole.

AVE aimed to show the value of media coverage if that same coverage had been a paid ad rather than earned media. It was bullshit, plain and simple, as it didn’t account for sentiment, credibility or any other measurement that fit around it.

There are plenty of other metrics thrown around that apply arbitrary (and, often, opaque) formulae to generate meaningless values for social media activities. I can’t stand them (plus, they violate the Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles, which the world’s biggest PR firms (ours included) have endorsed.

Please – let’s stop creating fake numbers and take a long, hard look instead at how we can tie our activities back to business objectives, and measure against that.

Fair?

What’s more, the traffic to this post is continuing to rise over time. Here’s a chart of the daily traffic to the post:

Doesn’t look much like the typical ‘long tail’ image of traffic over time, does it?

I got to wondering why this is happening. Here are my ideas:

1. Useful content

The 13-part series of posts I wrote on communications planning walk through the process of creating a communications plan, from start to finish. It (I hope) is useful stuff; content that people find applicable and helpful.

2. Evergreen content

These posts are as helpful today as they were when I wrote them. While best practices around plan development will, I’m sure, evolve over time, this series should remain helpful for a long time.

3. Optimize for search

As someone pointed out to me on Twitter, Google “good communications plan” and this post is the top result. “Communications plan” continues to be one of the top search terms used to reach this site. I thought-through the titles of the posts, and the cross-linking between them, when first writing them, and it worked well.

I’d love to hear your take – have you experienced this kind of effect before? What caused it then?