Listening to The Groundswell

Forrester analyst, social media guru, author and ASAE09 keynote speaker Charlene Li emphasizes using the groundswell to listen to your organization's stakeholders.  And while social media offers great tools for creating communities, and for tapping into existing ones as listening posts, more traditional tools specifically web analytics emphasize opportunities not just to listen, but also to watch the behaviors of stakeholders online.

Without a doubt, Twitter and Facebook are powerful for learning what stakeholders think, pose questions for consideration and stimulate conversations.  With a good viral video, game, contest, resource or software application, you may even be able to prompt key audiences to take action.  But because social media is still in its infancy and because most tools function within their own isolated silos, organizations are finding it difficult to get from them sufficient detailed metrics about the behaviors/actions of their stakeholders. Consider Twitter, a service that has enjoyed much viral buzz during the past year.  There are few, if any, tools even for tracking streams of conversation.  Tracking simple actions, like when a visitor clicks on the link to a resource of interest relies primarily on the capabilities of services like bit.ly, tr.im and tinyurl.  Using bit.ly's current set of analytics, I can tell little more than how many individuals have clicked on a link I have posted.  Without segmented data, gross numbers do not tell me who did the clicking, their interests, how they found my tweet and other valuable information.

At least for now, there is no more comprehensive tool for tracking behavior online than web analytics.  Tracking the interconnection of web sites and links provide insights about online visitors, the credibility of their referrers, quality of user experience, conversions and more.  Despite the attempts of Facebook, for example, to project itself as an applications platform, web sites are still richer and more flexible for providing capabilites, quality user experiences and data collection. Available tools, like Google Analytics, Webtrends and others offer a comprehensiveness in measurement that the social media services have yet to approach.

While it makes no sense to ignore social media (it is not going away), online communicators must balance the groundswell of enthusiasm around it with the reality that among its stengths  there are also limitations.  An effective way to leverage social media in its current state of sophistication requires that communicators consider communication goals and measurement needs.  Social media is great for listening, speaking and conversing, a great tool for engagement.  But for measuring stakeholder behaviors, the traditional web (at least today) is still the king.  Bridging social media with more traditional online communications will provide more complete solutions. While assessing the value of your social media tools by their ability to deliver metrics doesn't sound exciting, it is key to getting results, measuring ROI and convincing your boss or board of directors of their value.