KDPaine

Measuring Social Media – the SAS way

April 13th, 2010

SAS | The Power To Know

How can you measure the RIO of Social Media activity? At one level you can measure the number of friends/followers you have got. You can also measure how many times you are re-tweeted or mentioned in blogs but what is actually being said about you? You can even check out how many followers/friends they have got so you have a measure of ‘reach’. Is what is being said about you positive, negative or neutral? Are the people mentioning you influential or not? Beyond follower numbers etc how would you decide that?

So far software tracking solutions have not really been able to accurately track and report on sentiment and influence reliably or accurately. I remember a couple of years ago when running a social media campaign for a retail client having to personally read every mention in Forums, blogs and social media sites we could find, to check what was said and rate it. At least it was only for a product launch that covered a few weeks. i would have gone mad if we had needed to do it on a longer or ongoing basis.

I was really interested when I saw a Tweet from Katie Paine (one of the foremost experts on online PR and measurement) saying that she was attending an SAS event announcing their new Social Media Analytics product/service. I was even more impressed when Katie was asked about the accuracy level and she said her tests had shown it exceeded 90% which was better than any other product on the market at the moment.

Katie Paine

The demo and Q&A sessions indicated an ‘onboard’ of a few weeks as they set up the system parameters and target sources and key words. This phase seems very manual and includes some fine tuning. They mentioned a cost of $50k. The dashboard reports are set up and then there is a monthly cost of ‘$10k – $15k’. These costs mean that they are priced for the Enterprise market.

This should be the link to the SAS webcast and a link to their press release.