Make a Commitment

These days it seems everybody has a blog or podcast that lets them share their thoughts with the cyberworld at large. But if you want that soul-sharing to lift your bottom line, it’s sometimes hard to separate the meaningful from the navel-gazing. Direct talked with Blue Sky Factory president Greg Cangialosi about the metrics and methodologies developing in social media. Blue Sky is a Baltimore-based e-mail service provider with more than 650 clients in entertainment, travel, higher education and other verticals. It’s helped the likes of Disney, Dow Chemical and Verizon Wireless expand their content distribution through podcasting.

DIRECT: A lot of companies are jumping on the social media bandwagon. But are they doing a good job of integrating these applications into their overall marketing plans?

CANGIALOSI: I think a lot of companies are doing it sloppily. People don’t realize at the outset that they really shouldn’t jump into social media unless they’re committed to doing it right. The worst thing you can do is launch a corporate blog that doesn’t get updated, or do a podcast that’s infrequent or stinks, just to say you’re doing it. I think an awareness of the landscape is evolving.

DIRECT: Is a common methodology developing?

CANGIALOSI: A three-step approach seems to make sense for most people. The first step is setting up someone on staff to listen to the conversations online, to find out who the thought leaders are in your market and see who’s saying what about you and where. [The second step] is when you feel comfortable about participating. That’s when you start making comments and getting into the dialogue. The third step is contributing to the conversation and starting a blog, podcast or whatever. The barrier to entry is so low; bringing a voice to a company online and syndicating it is inexpensive. In some cases it only costs your time.

DIRECT: What mistakes are you seeing?

CANGIALOSI: Lack of commitment obviously is No. 1. And you can’t just think that ‘if you build it they will come’ — that’s the furthest thing from the truth. You can’t put out weak content.

DIRECT: What metrics are people using to track social media?

CANGIALOSI: To some degree, measurement is subjective. There’s the obvious technical metrics. We see e-mail as part of social media, so there’s things like open and clickthrough rates. From a blog standpoint, you look at how many subscribers you have to the RSS feed. If you’re doing new media production or promotion, you can track things like partial or complete downloads.

DIRECT: What about measuring engagement?

CANGIALOSI: That can be much harder to do. We’ve heard people talk about ROE — return on engagement. And there’s a new metric called the WOM (word of mouth) unit, measuring how many times your brand was mentioned online, using tools like Technorati to scour blogs and sites to see if you’ve been mentioned. You can also check comments on blog posts you’ve written. We’ve got clients who have taken these things to the next level and used them for lead generation and new business development. I don’t measure social media from a lead-generation perspective. I know definitively enough that this stuff is working because lead generation has proven to be a byproduct of participation. It just happens, as a result of engaging with the community, actively dialoging around the industry, putting good content out, going to live events and then engaging on places like Twitter and Facebook.