Imagen y Reputación

La definición de objetivos de investigación debe preceder a la acumulación de aplicaciones y recursos si deseamos obtener unos resultados que podamos integrar con lo que venimos haciendo y deseamos seguir conociendo de lo que cambia a nuestro alrededor.

Nate Elliott de Forrester Research, publicaba Three Steps To Measuring Social Media Marketing Measurement Framework Based On Objectives, Not Technologies (October 29, 2009 ) vía Enrique Burgos

Most social media initiatives target one of five objectives: listening, talking, energizing, supporting, or embracing. Marketers should pick one of these and stick with it. (Why just one? Choosing a single objective not only ensures you're focused when you design your social media efforts, it also allows you to more clearly define success when you're measuring those efforts.) Each objective has a corresponding set of metrics that are most important to gauging its success

* Listening: Focus on quality of energy. Listening allows marketers to use the groundswell for research and to better understand their customers — and if you're going to understand your customers, you need to know what they're saying about your company (quality of energy). For instance, McNally Smith College of Music uses listening tools to track how often prospective students talk about its program and creates tag clouds to understand the sentiment of those conversations.

* Talking: Focus on user reach and user impact. We define talking as using the groundswell to spread messages about your company. If this is your objective, you should focus on measuring how many consumers receive those messages (user reach) and how those messages change consumers' behaviors or opinions (user impact). For its Real or Fake campaign, software maker Adobe tracked the number of fans and page views its Facebook page generated, as well as the number of fans who clicked through to the software purchase page.

* Energizing: Focus on volume and quality of energy. Whether you call it viral marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, or energizing, this objective is about finding your most enthusiastic customers and encouraging them to pass along your messages for you. The primary success metrics for energizing efforts are the amount of chatter your advocates generate (volume of energy) and the nature of what they're saying about you (quality of energy). When Invoke Media launched Version 2.0 of its HootSuite service, it tracked Twitter's "Trending Topics" and the hashtags.org site to gauge the volume of conversation it had created.

* Supporting: Focus on quality of participation and user impact. In this objective, marketers use groundswell tools to help their customers support each other. The quality of the support your customers provide to each other (quality of participation) and the effect that has on how many consumers come directly to you for support (user impact) will tell you how successful your efforts have been. For example, Lenovo measures the number of times visitors to its support forums view posts marked as "accepted solutions" and has also tracked its support call center volume to monitor the decrease in calls since the community launched.

* Embracing: Focus on quality of participation. Embracing allows marketers to leverage the groundswell to influence product design and corporate strategy, so you should measure it on the quality of the ideas you receive (quality of participation). When Justin.tv gauges the success of its "new features" forum, it looks not just at the number of ideas submitted but at the percentage that it selects for inclusion in its product development pipeline.