Benchmark Your Social Media Responsiveness

I wrote recently about social media metrics and quoted Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang talking about how difficult it is to measure the value of social media communications.

In some areas, such as tweeting and blogging, numbers are essential, because frequency is important. In other areas, such as video, frequency may actually dull results. (See this Technology Review story about an HP study that found an inverse correlation between the frequency of videos posted on YouTube and the videos' popularity. If you post lots of videos, the popularity of your videos tends to decline.)

In addition to measuring hits, tweets, and posts, it's important to benchmark your organization's responsiveness to social media communications. If you're at a dinner party, it would be rude to sit silently for 5 minutes before responding to a comment or question that was addressed to you. Similarly, online, it's rude—or at least a missed opportunity—if you wait too long to respond to a tweet or blog post, especially if it's from a customer.

How to Benchmark Your Social Media Responsiveness

1. Pick 3-5 important social media events from the past week. These could be tweets, blog posts, or blog comments. They could occur on your media properties or someone else's. They could even be press releases or announcements of importance to your business, but not originating in a social media tool at all.
   
2. Check the time of the event and the time of your organization's first response.
   
3. Examine how the conversation developed. Did it broaden, involving multiple departments? Did the right people respond in the right way? Were the right people notified in time? Which tools did people use? Did a tweet lead to a tweet, then to a blog post? Did the conversation end up involving legal or PR?
   
4. If you uncovered any breakdowns in communication, or learned any lessons about the importance of promptness, review them with your team, and try better this week. You might need to fine-tune email aliases, ensure that blog readers are updated with the right RSS feeds, establish corporate policies regarding the content of social media communications (e.g., respectful, nothing off-color), and so on.
   
5. Repeat this exercise in a week or two, and see how you're doing. Did any past problems reappear? Did you notice any patterns?
   

By benchmarking your responsiveness, you can ensure that your organization is ready to respond as promptly and effectively as possible to important communications from customers, partners, the press, and the online community at large.

Stopwatch photo by wwarby, some rights reserved.