Question:
What tools and metrics are news organizations using to measure social media impact?
New tools like Seattle’s Newsdex offer the ability for local news sites to quickly assess their network size, and how they rank amongst their peers. What are the different ways you are measuring impact, reach and quality of service to the readers you serve?
Who wants to know?
Michael Fancher is a co-convenor of The Seattle Journalism Commons, which connects people and ideas, in person and online, in order to catalyze journalists and the public in creating, disseminating and engaging with news and information. Fancher retired from The Seattle Times in 2008 after 20 years as the executive editor.
Journalist, fan of facts, character and motivation. JA editorial director.
What about influence in terms of change? I’m intrigued by the measure “how many conversations did you provoke today?”- as Gary put it. Sometimes news organizations can trace their reporting directly to changing laws – like novelist and muckraker Upton Sinclair did with The Jungle more than 100 years ago. Anderson Cooper got trackable popularity points during Hurricane Katrina when he called out Senator Landrieu for appearing removed and unsympathetic to the plight of people in New Orleans. What is the right measure of the impact of journalism?
You always have to look at growth. Are the number of your facebook page likes increasing at an encouraging rate? Are your tweets being retweeted by those who matter and can get your name out there? Metrics like these are the ones that matter and that such organization should focus on.
Revenue Optimization for Publishers
It depends on whether the metrics apply to audience acquisition or monetization.
Social and search are audience development techniques. Metrics on social influence are great in terms of figuring out how to use a loyal audience to attract more audience members. Just as measuring keyword rankings helps to acquire traffic, measuring influence helps to acquire traffic. The key becomes once on the site how the publisher translates fly-by traffic into a loyal audience member. Knowing whether a visitor is a fly-by or a loyal audience member as well as the source should help a publisher optimize acquisition results.
Once acquired, a direct relationship with the reader is the basis for a recurring revenue model. Consequently, the most “profitable” publishers measure engagement of their loyal audience, because engagement is the unit of monetization. A publisher can charge a reader for engagement with content or sell the readers engagement to an advertiser. What share of online time are is the publsiher garnering? Publishers who measure and optimize their readers engagement have the most profit.
I am a retired journalist who believes journalism's best days are still ahead.
ProPublica has announced a new feature to engage readers in sharing investigative stories, called #Muckreads. See http://bit.ly/lnqYlb
Journalism + Community. Director of Community Outreach for @CoMissourian. Prof @Mizzou. Former fellow @RJI. Designer.
Rusty’s right. The most valuable tool will be when we can demonstrate our value to our actual customers — the people who pay us, meaning the advertisers. That doesn’t exist yet.
In the meantime, you have to enter into social media knowing what you’re trying to accomplish. Is it traffic back to your website? More specifically, is it more eyeballs and new traffic? Or more loyalty from the core audience? Is it more conversation, reaction and feedback from the community?
There are ways to strategically approach each of those things. But smart news organizations will know what they’re trying to do, and what success looks like for their specific situation.
In May, a group of smart engagement folks met at the Reynolds Journalism Institute to talk about metrics for engagement. You can find some information about their recommendations, and download their full report, here: http://www.rjionline.org/news/resource-newsrooms-measuring-success-audience-engagement-efforts-0