Tracking Social Media ROI

Viewing Spectrum Analytics

Marshall Sponder – Webmetricsguru.com
now.seo@gmail.com
@webmetricsguru
09/05/2010

pg 1
 two dimensional formulas in order to calculate Social
An Introduction to Spectrum Media ROI, even though it is tempting to do so, before
Analytics for Social Media ROI we are able to capture the information to put into those
formulas. While we can reduce a business’s financials to a
Social Media is a fairly new communications medium and
series of formulas that calculate profitability or loss, which
activity that is often considered to be “free” and available
is fairly well instrumented by accounting software and
to everyone. With abundant free and low cost tools and
CPA’s and best practices have been for hundreds of years
platforms to create, promote, monitor and analyze social
(for the sake of investment and profitability), it’s much more
media content businesses and individuals, excited about
difficult to do the same thing for Social Media ROI (which
what Social Media can do for them, too often assume that
is only a few years old).
measurement of Social Media can be taken care of as
more of an afterthought.

Why I wrote this paper, finding

In the past estimating Social Media ROI was acceptable,
Ultraviolet Data Nuggets and
increasingly that is no longer the case as outlined by
Rainbow Analytics
TheBrandBuilder, Oliver Blanchard1. As CMOs and CEOs
have started to seriously consider Social Media as an
Over the past year I worked with Cecilia Pineda Feret4
effective marketing medium, they also seeking a similar
analyzing the web site and social media of the Havana
level of precision in Return on Investment (ROI) metrics
Central5 restaurant group with a few locations in
they have gotten from Direct Marketing. Everyone is
Manhattan. We attempted to provide ROI information
attempting to devise a framework for their company’s
to the owner of the group and we regularly discussed
Social Media ROI, but the challenge is somewhat different
the challenge of tracking our efforts for the company,
for each business and industry.
the brand and the bottom line. For a small business,
tracking and measuring this involves looking under the
What are the metrics; beyond the basics such as how
radar and following over the rainbow to find the ROI.
many Fans and Followers an account has that can actually
Yet, every business has a different pot of golden data
help management manage better? And, of course, what
nuggets (or rainbow pancakes, they’re easier to find!), or
metrics affect the HOLY GRAIL of business metrics: the
RAINBOW ROI (Cecilia Pineda Feret coined this term in
bottom line?
our discussions about Havana Central ROI tracking and
analytics).
Lately, a lot of attention has been placed of formulas
to calculate Social Media ROI. In fact, earlier this year
The usual data on the radar are easy to capture:
Altimeter Group and Web Analytics Demystified shared a
hits, followers, page views, etc. These metrics are
framework for Social Media Metrics and ROI2 addressing
more diagnostic according to Stratigent’s Jennifer
the Marketing Industry Challenge:”I can’t measure social
Veesenmeyer6, allowing you to compare data points
media ROI.” The metrics were generalized to fit into
over time, and against competitors, and so on without
a framework, which I analyzed3 in a series of posts at
necessarily providing any actionable insight into what the
Webmetricsguru.com. I believe the framework is a step in
business should change or keep doing. Additional metrics
the right direction, but much more guidance is needed.
are also required such as knowing results of efforts which
were the most effective in bringing in sales, expanding the
I will even go further by suggesting we avoid talking about

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customer base, and increasing exposure of the brand.
Acting as an analyst here my insights are usually
connected with data I touch. I reasoned data to prove
Social Media outreach is effective in driving new business
and revenue was available, but we were not able to
capture it. I termed such data as “ultraviolet”, because we
can’t see ultraviolet light, yet it’s present all around us.

I thought about what it takes to capture the information
and tabulate it. When I started this line of thought my goal
was not necessarily to solve Havana Central’s problem
as much as to prove community management was an
effective income generator for any restaurant chain. I
decided to create an approach anyone could use to find
how much data they were missing and what they could do
to enable data capture in preparation for Social Media ROI
based on the need to analyze the full spectrum of data and
initial discussion of the concept can be found on my blog7.
While coming up with this approach we realized Havana
Central really needed a connection from the business and
how it operates to the customer, and back to the business
for tracking via analytics using tactics such as couponing,
secret passwords and perks for VIPs, etc.
Read on to find out more about the methodology.
Setting Measurement Goals
Every business falls into some type of category. In order
to know what is realistic to strive for in relation to Social
Media, it helps to know what the average traffic is and
sites for the category you business is in.
Figure 1 – Compete PRO Referral Analytics Traffic
Dashboard, July 2010 for Industry Category: Entertainment
Guide: Restaurants and Dining8
Havana Central’s Referral traffic as detailed by Compete.
com shows no traffic at all from Social Networks (low
sample site) and so a marketing goal ought to include
meeting or surpassing the average referral traffic from
Social Networks for the relevant category – in this case,
several hundred more visits per month from Facebook
alone would be called for (note: Google Analytics shows
some Facebook and Twitter traffic to havanacentral.com).
Similar diagnostics can be obtained from Google Analytics
Benchmarking (when sharing data with Google) based on
business type. The charts below show that on average,
Havana Central gets 3.75 times more visits than the
average restaurant using Google Analytics but the average
restaurant is generating more pageviews per visit (it may
have more to do, in this case, with PDF menus that are
downloaded but not counted as pageviews or otherwise
tracked by Google Analytics unless virtual pageviews are
created for each menu).

For restaurants, on average 5% of referral traffic to top

restaurants comes from Facebook, 0.16% from Twitter and
.27% comes from MySpace.com according to Compete’s
Referral Analytics Traffic Dashboard for the Entertainment
Guide: Restaurant and Dining Category. (a new offering of
Compete I provided suggestions about early on).

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Figure 2 – Google Analytics Benchmarking of
Havanacentral.com vs. all other restaurant sites in
Google’s database.
Using benchmarking tools like Compete, Quantcast,
Comscore, Nielsen, Alexa and in this respect, Google
Analytics, is useful in order to formulate some business
goals (which can also turn into measurement goals),
especially those connected to Social Media, but they
are not a replacement for direct measurement using site
analytics.
In fact, Web Analytics data and Compete.com data almost
never match as the methods to obtain the information in
both cases are different which accounts for the disparity
in numbers of unique visitors, visits, pageviews, etc. In my
discussions with Compete, they have also pointed out their
tools are meant to complement, not replace site analytics.
It’s also notable Comscore, Compete and Quantcast allow
JavaScript tags to be added to your website which allow
more accurate measurements for you business (but not
necessarily your competitors unless they are also adding
JavaScript tags to their sites).
Missing Measurement Standards
The Web Analytics Association released Web Analytics
Standards a few years back and there have been similar
9
attempts by the Internet Advertising Bureau for Banner
Advertising, Social Ads and Video Ads. Setting up
standards may be a necessary step before widespread
monetization can take place. In fact, an article I wrote
for VentureBeat /SocialBeat last year10 suggested Video
publishers had the IAB’s VAST standard to thank for rapid
monetization of video ads that started taking place; I quote
from my article here:
… Monetizing online video has been somewhat
problematic because the technology in place interfered
with easy communications between publishers and
third party video ad platforms.
But that’s beginning to change, partly due to the IAB
(Internet Advertising Bureau), via the VAST Standard.
According to the IAB, VAST (Video Ad Serving
Template) includes a standard XML-based ad response
for in-stream video and an XML Schema Definition
(“XSD”) for developers. It’s meant to accommodate the
majority of current practices within the online digital
video advertising business. The gains we‘re seeing
now were almost impossible to achieve until the VAST
Standard, which made it easier to obtain end-to-end
control between ad servers and associated video
players (said CEO Tod Sacerdoti)
Because we lack standard definitions for influence,
conversations, engagement and conversions, to name
a few, it’s so very much harder to reach an interoperable
place where all the platforms that need to talk to each
other, can, in a meaningful way.
My work at the Web Analytics Association as Board
Director in 2007-2009 led to creating and leading the
Social Media Committee (now-defunct)11; it showed me
the industry lacked consensus on social media standards
and many of the players I talked to at the time liked it that
way (standards may be seen by some as a way to stifle
innovation). I don’t know if that’s still true.
On the other hand, for Social Media to “grow up”
Standards definitions may be needed; I for one, believe
they are very needed and important work is being done
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in the UK to achieve those standards through the CIPR
(Certified Institute of Public Relations) Social Media
Monitoring study group and panel , of which I’m an
12
honorary member. I hope readers will follow CIPR-CP
leader Philip Sheldrake quest to come up with standards
13
for Influence.
In this paper the lack of standards could mean any
measures a company comes up with to measure its own
social media efforts (hopefully after aligning their business
and measurement goals and strategies) will be difficult to
apply universally, outside the context a specific business
that came up with their own measures.
That is OK for the short term, but in the longer term, we
need consensus on what we measure and how to put
that measurement in place. Once we have that, Rainbow
Analytics will be much easier to achieve.
Aligning Business Processes to
Measurement Goals
A common challenge for Social Media Measurement and
the biggest roadblock finding the data nuggets under the
radar and over the rainbow are business processes that
are unaligned with a business’s goals for measurement.
One example, obtaining Requests for a Quote (for a
potential catering) which corresponds to a page on the
Havana Central site (monitored by Google Analytics on
one side and back end email request on the other) typically
require communications between a marketing assistant
and community manager (communications didn’t happen
often enough or were too difficult to maintain).
Catering jobs generate several thousand dollars of income,
per job, to the bottom line, but the business process
wasn’t yet aligned to the measurement goal (attribution of
a referral to outreach). One solution is to have the same
person do Community Outreach, Management and track
catering orders in a spreadsheet that could work for a very
small operation that can live with a manual process but
quickly becomes un-scalable.
It also brings up another issue; at what point does
tracking and monitoring roles interfere with going out and
generating business? Marketing tasks are often assigned
to different people/groups for reason; unless those people
are the same page in every respect that matters how well
can we expect them to communicate, or even agree on
what needs to be done, needs to be tracked and how?
The communications process is often too taxing for many
SMB’s and it’s difficult even for large corporations but
larger businesses are usually willing to make strategic
investments in messaging technology, business and social
media measurement processes while SMB’s, often just
trying to survive in difficult economic times, cannot or
are unwilling to try. It might seem that communications
problems (such as two individuals being on the same
page) would be easy to solve, but it’s usually not the case.
Another example from my experience working with Havana
Central was creating and fine tuning Radian6 Alerts in
order to know when customers were in a location and
offering them a drink14 (or a coupon, which was never set
up). I saw the potential here but got frustrated with the
results.
You can’t blame it on software, automation (Radian6,
FourSquare and Facebook Places to name a few) took
care of knowing people are in a venue by sending us email
alerts (a measurement goal for Social Media attribution);
but the business goal of Brand Awareness and Customer
Loyalty (which are much harder to align and scorecard)
was not aligned with the measurement strategy I came up
with (getting management to be on the same page with
business and measurement strategies is the subject of
several books onto itself and I’m not going over it here).
pg 4

Testing this approach in the real world of a NYC restaurant
chain we found no systems in place yet to incentive very
busy struggling restaurant managers, waiters and waitress
(who need to be trained and often change jobs) to gather
the information (a customer is in a location, greet them and
offer a coupon) and record it in such a way that it can be
attributed to Social Media and then tabulate into an ROI
metric. Specific middleware to record the transactions was
also missing.
This lack of alignment is the biggest problem we have as
the tools are in place to measure most of what we need
already and plenty of people have come up with measures
for Social Media ROI, but there’s almost succeeding in
defining and aligning the social media dimension of your
business goals to your overall measurement goals leading
to the common result of Social Media ROI that cannot
be accurately defined or measured (but is sometimes
estimated); several people are working on this problem
right now but no one I know of has solved it.
rest of the organization). At least, that’s how it looked to
me.
Each part of an organization has its own goals and
methodologies to serve its own purposes and to get work
done; weather those purposes support or interfere with
accurate measurement is up for you, the reader, to decide.
In fact, just about every business unit, every company,
every corporation, every city, state and every country
have the same exact communication issues around goals
and strategies, and as we have seen throughout our
civilization’s history, this is not an easy problem to solve.
Maybe the best way to look at our differences as stepping
stone to better way of communication that serve us all
(once there is enough consensus and people in place at
the top that can focus business and measurement goals,
strategies and policies).

Everyone reading this paper can likely attest to many

instances of the very same alignment issues in their own
organizations, once you step back and think about it.
There may be several valid reasons why your business
strategies aren’t aligned with measurement strategies; for
example, when I worked at IBM.com (2003-2008) we were
usually unable to track marketing and search optimization
activities all the way down the sales channel.

Part of the problem was traced back to technology

(accounting systems that don’t speak to each other),
another part were was sheer volume of activities and
people (finding the right people in each part of IBM to talk
to each other was problem) but the biggest issue did not
turn out to be technology, as much as it was business
processes for sales organization appeared to be different,
and in conflict, with the measurement goals of the dotcom
(IBM.com operates as a separate business unit from the

pg 5
Figure 3 – Radian6 charts showing Social Media Buzz
Measurement of Havana Central Times Square location
vs. neighboring restaurants Blue Fin, Heartland Brewery,
Carmine’s Times Square, and Bond 45. The chart on the
right shows the number of twitter followers of those who
tweeted about each restaurant in the last 3 months and
where they are located by region. Note: this chart shows
aspects of Brand Awareness for the 5 restaurants surveyed
here.
Finding the right middleware to
record results
This lack of alignment is the biggest problem we have
as the tools are in place to measure most of what we
need already and plenty of people have come up with
measures for Social Media ROI, but there’s almost
no one succeeding in defining and aligning the social
media dimension of your business goals to your overall
measurement goals leading to a common result of Social
Media ROI that cannot be accurately defined or measured
(but is sometimes estimated); several people are working
on this problem right now but no one I know of has solved
it.
Figure 4 – part of the authors’ visualization of a Radian6
date export of visits by Twitter Accounts to any Havana
Central location from June 09-June 10 (anyone checking in
via FourSquare, or tweeting they were eating at one of the
locations), see http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/
social-media-case-study-havana-central/ for more details.
Why Social CRM is needed
Over the last year Social CRM has quickly evolved as
means to connect Social Media Chatter to existing records
in Salesforce and other CRMs. This space is quickly
becoming one of the hot topics in Social Media Monitoring
and will be subject of a future paper by the author.
Closing the Gap and Finding the
Rainbow
Data can be collected from Social Media Monitoring
platforms like Radian6 easily enough, but connecting a
visitor (a social media awareness goal & a measurement
goal) with increased sales by restaurant location generated
from social media customers as a result of social media
outreach (a business goal) takes a level of middleware
(Social CRM, covered in the previous section) plus more
buy in and patience from management (it’s often a hard
combination to come by).
Also needed is a way of connecting monitoring platforms
such as Radian6 and the backend check receipts; today is
only being envisioned and no one that I know of has done
it yet. While this paper focuses on restaurants with its
focus on location, check-ins, cash receipts, catering and
reviews, the same process can be applied to any business
with slight modifications.
Barcode / QR code readers, RFID and Geo-fencing are
expected to close the gap for restaurant venues in the next
two years but the software to connect all this data must be
CRM aware and I expect the role of community manager
will evolve into Relationship Management within the
next 18 months. Acquisitions by Scout Labs by Lithium
Technologies, Radian6 partnerships with Salesforce and
recent enhancements by Alterian around the SM2 platform
are just the beginning of the tip of the data iceberg lying
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under the surface, just waiting to be tapped.
Getting Started by Performing a
Social Enablement Audit
The only way to know how much precious data your
business has in the unseen spectrum is to audit your
data. Specifically, list all the sources of data your business
has and what campaigns and marketing initiatives your
business is running. This table shows data from Havana
Central.
Figure 5 – Social Enablement Audit of Havana Central
I put all the data sources vertically and all the campaigns,
including website promos and pages horizontally. Note, the
x- and y-axis could be reversed easily.
By conducting an audit of all the available data sources
within in the context of all the known marketing campaigns
and initiatives, we learn what information we have, where
to find it, what format it is in and the level of difficulty
in overlaying data in order to create Social Media ROI
metrics we need.
In this example, data validating community management
shows up partly in Google Analytics and Radian6, but
will fail to appear anywhere else. It is next to impossible
without a guaranteed tie into a revamped business process
to track the actual dollar value to the outreach being done
in behalf of the business, though one could estimate it (for
example, each tweet about eating at the restaurant can
be estimated to be worth over $100 based on the average
order size, the average party size and the average price of
a meal).
Estimating Social Media ROI is useful when you make a
decision to expand or retract a marketing initiative but is
not a replacement for actual ROI measures that are tied to
a transaction.
In another case, traffic and possible marketing efforts
directed at the VIP page of the Havana Central restaurant
site15 can be expected to appear in Google Analytics and
Google Adwords (when ads are run) but not anywhere else.
Figure 6 – How enabled are we for Social Media ROI?
Most data is collected in Silos16, it’s pretty much always
been that way and is getting worse according to Robert
Scoble17. Applications are designed to provide specific
functionality and data are collected around it, but usually
applications aren’t designed to integrate with anything else
– in this case, we don’t expect a reservation site such as
Opentable, handling most restaurant reservations to have
data on Community Management outreach of the VIP page
of a website.
For Social Media ROI calculations that are tied to an actual
transaction that takes place at the restaurant or its online
site we need a logical way to overlay data, using what is
commonly called a common key18, that currently doesn’t
exist in this business context. Figure 6 suggests, based on
the Enablement Audit that 82% of the data is “ultraviolet”
or invisible (or, not able to be combined because a
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common key does not exist).
One approach used by large corporations is to overlay
data into Data Cubes or data warehouse where all the
data you have can be imported into a Cube19, but usually
the resources to pull something like this together are
beyond reach of most businesses, including those who
want measure ROI the most, small businesses and even
PR Companies doing social media programs as part of
Public Relations and Marketing (in behalf of their clients).
Brick and mortar SMBs who could not possibly conceive,
afford or execute such a data cube even though they may
actually require one, but once your data is in the Cube you
can perform analysis that could uncover ROI and customer
behavior that is not ordinarily visible.
Figure 7 – slices of a data cube
Given the lack of the needed common key (in this case,
a common record locator for every record in Google
Analytics, Opentable, SeemlessWeb, Email Marketing, etc)
in many data sources – information needed to populate the
data cube is going to be spotty, noisy and in other cases
hard to translate it to the right structure to be effective.
According to Gary Angel, the CTO of Semphonic, when
you integrate data into a data warehouse, you open up
new questions, targeting opportunities, and analysis
methods that otherwise doesn’t exist19.
Figure 8 – Data Coverage
In the process of doing a Social Enablement Audit you
might find that you are not collecting all the data you
needed; in this case you may not have some data that you
need in any form and in any data source. The best way
to find out if you missing collecting data is to compare
your data sources to each other. As you examine your
data you may find there are some things you want to
know that no application is tracking at all and this will
drive new solutions for your business. What we’re trying
to find out here is how compatible is the data being used
to run your business to each other and how easy is it
to integrate information. Typically, applications are not
created to integrate and the data within each source and
are frequently incompatible with each other.
One attempt to answer the compatibility problem was
Adobe (formally Omniture) Open Business Analytics
Platform20 using Web Analytics as central point to unify
disparate applications such as Radian6 (one of our data
sources), several different Content Management Systems,
Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and
even Opentable, using Omniture for their own marketing
analysis, (using Test and Target) within Site Catalyst, but
all of these require a lot of money and time that do not
make sense to implement for most small business (not
until someone comes up with a suite of tools for low end of
the market that makes data integrations much easier and
inexpensive).
pg 8
Supposing you could integrate all the data you need into
a cube, would the resulting reports lead to insights not
ordinarily obtainable? I think so, but it will depend on how
well business processes are translated in to the matching
reports via a clearly defined measurement strategy,
mentioned earlier, and gifted analysts needed to make
sure they do. Hopefully, business will also learn how to
listen to what the analysts have to say when they are able
to come up with marketing insights and give them a seat
at the table which they traditionally haven’t had in most
organizations.
I believe it’s time to consider doing similar enablement
for Social Media that we more typically perform for Web
Analytics (with extensive page tagging often required to
pick up specific customer behavior, often a measurement
goal).
Figure 9 – Stages of Web Analytics Evolution from Judah
Phillips deck on Webanalytics congress the Netherlands,
Amsterdam June 2nd 2010, slide 14 . 21
In the beginning of Web Analytics circa early 1990’s basic
diagnostic data is all that could be collected and today,
many businesses are capable of tracking much more than
this (with proper enablement) but settle for using the basic
gauges of visitors, visits, pageviews though little insight
into business can be obtained this way.
At the turn of the century analytics improved and business
could use the data to analyze their sites, but most
businesses didn’t know how to define their business goals
and translate them into measurement goals and align their
organizations so that real analysis could happen with the
result good analysis was done, but rarely.
Around 2005 things got to be more interesting with a
convergence of sorts including Flash and Ajax tracking
evolving, but again, most organizations aren’t yet able,
willing or think it’s too expensive to translate what they do
and what they want to track into what these tools can do
and what they can track, and as a result much data and
insight is lost.
As social media began as grassroots, peer to peer
expression of communications between friends and fans,
etc, this kind of integration had not lent itself to being
instrumented in the same way Site Analytics evolved but
it’s only a matter of time until it does get instrumented,
much as Web Analytics has. As corporations are going
more social, so are SMB’s. Parallels between Social Media
Measurement and Web Analytics suggest convergence
and the possibility of actual ROI measurement once
business goals are merged with right measurement goals.
With geo-location coming into the mix and checking in
quickly becoming the universal currency, it may become
easier to integrate social media with the rest of the data
sources – and the cost and complexity will decrease on
the low end, making possible for SMB’s to have a plug
and play solution within the next two years. However,
translating your business process, connecting the Data
Rainbow back to measurement will be required even in
streamlined solutions, leaving room for a lot of creativity.
Finding Data Nuggets of Gold
under Data Rainbow
It’s my belief we do not achieve actual Social Media ROI
pg 9
unless we can segment social media activity and associate
it across data sources and marketing channels back to
pancakes!)
actual revenue. In fact, most business and consultancies
In order to know what can and can’t be combined to
have no idea how to start, which is why it doesn’t happen
form Social Media ROI we need to look at the data we’re
often, if it does at all.
collecting in greater detail – assessing what we actually
have to work with.

Figure 11 – A Opentable Report

An Opentable report as it is currently generated is almost

impossible to attribute to Social Media outreach there’s
no common key to associate with a visitor from Facebook
(unless the application tracks that). Opentable tracks
website visitors that came from Havana Central, but there’s
no way to count how much of it was Social Media related
in the reports they provide to business owners.
The same problem arises with Grubhub, a popular
Restaurant Search utility.

Figure 10, Example of a Data Rainbow

Only a fraction of the data we need to collect to track

Social Media ROI is actually being saved (or seen) in a
way that can be analyzed and connect to Social Media
Figure 12 – A Grubhub report
Marketing initiatives. The chart above shows some of the
individual silos of data for Havana Central (the different
The Grubhub report has no common key except a date,
data sources above might can be termed silos for the
everything else is tied back to internal databases that are
purpose of this paper).
not accessible (i.e.: ID number), no easy way to tie back to
Google Analytics (unless we can put tracking code into a
Grubhub instance, which is really hard to do for third party
Looking at the Data in our Silos
applications like Grubhub and Opentable).
for data nuggets (or rainbow
pg 10
Radian6 reports that monitor Buzz around the restaurant
do offer possibilities to tracking what website visitors do
on your website through its integration with WebTrends
and in your business location via Salesforce.com but
few businesses have adopted those integrations to my
knowledge.
As these Social Media targeted integrations exist at all
but are rarely adopted, suggest businesses are too often
unaware of the choices they have before them when
they formulate their business goals and measurement
strategies and often choose unwisely or fail to choose
at all. In any case, while your Social Media campaigns
might be driving a certain level activity which should be
measureable, that same activity is invisible to the reports
you can currently pull from Opentable and Grubhub,
Google Analytics, Facebook and even Radian6 without
deliberate measurement enablement and the alignment of
your measurement strategy with you business strategy.
Comparing data dimensions
and combining them in the Data
Rainbow
Figure 13 – Data Dimensions comparison
In the chart above I highlighted in green dimensions from
different data sources that might be able to be combined
to get that Rainbow view and insights derived. We know
by now the vast majority of data being collected cannot be
combined based on the example above. While your data
will too often be missing that common key that can be
used to link all the transactions together it’s still possible to
fill the gaps with third party applications and ingenuity.
Finding Solutions to Bridge the
Gaps
Figure 14 – Measurement Solutions by Campaign or
Marketing Initiative
Taking a closer look at a specific marketing initiative
against the sources of data available can drive solutions
where missing data can be added in when it’s missing.
Look at your campaigns and marketing. Figure out how
to add the additional enablement that would allow you to
track the Social Media ROI of a particular activity such
as somebody downloading a menu if they came from
Facebook or Twitter.
Bridging the Data Gap Example
– Connecting Facebook and
Opentable for Data Nuggets
Figure 15 – Finding ways to connect Opentable with
Facebook
You may need to develop or find 3rd party applications
capable of bridging the gaps found using this audit
process. While we can enable Google Analytics/FB
connection –we still need a Content Management System
pg 11
that connects a website, Google Analytics and Opentable
and Google Analytics can act as a go between.
BTW, in the process of detailing needed capabilities our
audit concludes the best enablement would be rebuilding
that website (ouch!) with a CMS (SiteWrench CMS) that
can handle Opentable & Google Analytics integration22.
Conclusions:
1) “States of Readiness” for Social Media ROI Analytics
implementation are very similar to those for Web Analytics,
where there are various levels of participation using the
tools currently available. For example, Radian6, Salesforce
CRM and WebTrends integrate but most businesses are
not ready to take advantage of it yet. Once business
moves from past collecting basic diagnostic data, they
can begin to merge their business strategy and goals
with specific measurement strategies and goals and the
measurement of Real Social Media ROI can begin.
2) Most businesses, esp. SMB’s are not yet ready to fully
implement the data audit methodology. Someone needs
to come along and make the process easier for them, and
more streamlined, before this is going to happen on an
SMB level. I suspect a streamlined implementation of data
audits will differ somewhat based on business verticals.
However, within each vertical there will be enough
similarities to standardize and streamline (i.e.; most
restaurants use Opentable and SeemlessWeb and should
be part of the solution for this vertical, but perhaps not
for other types of retail establishments like Supermarkets,
clothing outlets, Travel Sites, Hotels, etc, which will need
different sets of data feeds and metrics).
3) Depending on an actual SMBs’ goals, what you are
measuring may be different for another SMB, even in the
same or another industry. The challenge here is to capture
the data that is not immediately seen or considered and
relatable back to a Social Media effort by linking your
measurement strategy and goals with your business
strategy and goals.
4) To capture this data, we need to perform a complete
audit of efforts made. It may be a time consuming task
depending on the size and complexity of the business, but
for the moment remains the best way to fully consider and
fully integrate efforts across multiple platforms.
5) The best place to integrate all the data sources for
your business is within the analytics platforms such as
Google Analytics, Adobe Site Catalyst (formerly known as
Omniture) though other solutions such as Spredfast are
available.
6) You need to work with your web developers,
programmers, product and sales teams to enable tracking
of certain actions to ensure that your efforts are being
tracked and what meaning you assign to them other than
just collecting them on a periodic basis like many continue
to do.
pg 12

What you’ll find at the end of the Data Rainbow …… Yum!
(Amanda - http://iammommy.typepad.com/my_
weblog/2009/10/rainbow-pancake-sugar-cookies-winnie-
the-pooh.html)
Links
1. http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/how-
to-not-calculate-social-media-r-o-i/ Oliver Blanchard has
written several posts and a popular SlideShare presenting
his views on what is and is not Social Media ROI.
2. Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics (Altimeter
Group & Web Analytics Demystified) see http://www.web-
strategist.com/blog/2010/04/22/altimeter-report-social-
marketing-analytics-with-web-analytics-demystified/
3. http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/social-
marketing-analytics/ - there are actually 8 posts I wrote on
the subject, not all show up with this URL.
4. http://www.linkedin.com/in/ceciliapinedaferet Cecilia
Pineda Feret’s LinkedIn page.
5. http://www.havanacentral.com Havana Central Website
6. http://www.stratigent.com/news-and-events/pimp_
your_reports/default.html Stratigent’s Pimp Your Reports
program which I recently attended
7. http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/08/
on-360-degree-analytics/ - put forward that most of the
interesting data that proves Social Media is working is
invisible to the naked eye – or “ultraviolet”. However, with
the right devices and mythology the data can be seen and
quantified
8. http://www.compete.com/referrals/referrals/
category/3037/?threshold=1
9. http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/resource/
resmgr/PDF_standards/WebAnalyticsDefinitions.pdf
10. http://social.venturebeat.com/2009/11/29/brightroll-
says-video-ad-profits-are-soaring/
11. http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/?c_
reorganization
12. http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/cipr-social-media-
measurement-group-launches
13. Phillip Sheldrake on Twitter @sheldrake
14. http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/social-
media-case-study-havana-central/ The author was often
frustrated why we could not go further here.
15. http://havanacentral.com/vip.php
16. http://management.about.com/od/businessstrategy/a/
pg 13
DataInteg02.htm

17. http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/03/location-2012/
Robert Scoble argues massive amounts of Geo-Location
data is being collected in Silos when it would be better for
consumers the data was shared across all vendors.

18. http://analyticsinsightblog.stratigent.com/2010/09/
centralize-your-data-using-adobe.html The article
suggests Web Analytics platform Site Catalyst is one place
where it’s possible to pull together data from disparate
sources into actionable dashboards and reports.

19. http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2010/06/
further-thoughts-on-data-warehousing.html - Gary Angel
suggest 3 dimensional arrays open up new questions,
targeting opportunities, and analysis methods that
otherwise don’t exist.

20. http://www.omniture.com/en/products/open_
business_analytics_platform Adobe Omniture Open
Business Analytics Platform.

21. http://www.slideshare.net/webanalisten/webanalytics-
congress-the-netherlands-amsterdam-june-2nd-2010-
judah-phillips

22. SiteWrench CMS – this CMS seems to have it all.

pg 14