The Conclave: New standards in social media measurement
Social media metrics in six priority areas of social media measurement were published by the Conclave, the Social Media Group of the Coalition for Public Relations Research Standards, in the beginning of June.
Conglomerate of experts and the industry
For 18 months the members of the Conclave, the Social Media section of the Coalition for Public Relations Research Standards, developed proposals for industry-wide standards in social media measurement. For each of the six priority areas a core group donated its expertise and experience to create the standards. During the complete process of developing, feedback and suggestions from the industry – research associations, agencies and companies – were required. As each set of standards was written, it was posted to the website www.smmstandards.org for review and public comments. The input was finally aggregated and the standards were updated.
#SMM catalogue provides definitions and best practices
The result of this process is a detailed “#SMM catalogue” that can be viewed and downloaded online. The document contains six priority areas of online communication where standards in measurement and evaluation are required according to the Conclave:
- Content Sourcing and Methods
- Reach and Impression
- Engagement
- Influence and Relevancy
- Opinion and Advocacy
- Impact and Value.
Each of the core areas is in-depth described by not only defining metrics, but also specifying applications and providing information regarding the metric type (e.g. outcome, outtake). Moreover, best practices improve the understanding for the new standards and guidelines help to give decision support in practice.
The catalogue provides metrics in six core areas.
For example, the #SMM catalogue provides a core definition for both key concepts of “Engagement” and “Conversation” and illustrates the difference between. Social media engagement is defined as an action, that happens in response to content on an owned channel ("when someone engages with you"). It should be measured by likes, video views and retweets etc. Social media conversation is defined as a form of online discussion between several parties, e.g. about brands or issues via your or third party channels ("when someone talks about you"). Metrics are Facebook posts, blog posts, tweets and comments.
We will have to see by international discussion, practical application, but also long-term implementation, whether the #SMM standards of the Conclave are really „perhaps the most important social media launch of the year“, as Katie D. Paine wrote on her blog KDPaine`s PR Measurement. The standards have been already used in the AMEC Social Media Valid Framework.
About the Conclave
The Conclave is a broad coalition of B2B and B2C companies, PR and Social Media Agencies, and industry associations. It initially convened in 2011 to establish industry-wide standards and best practices for Social Media. Members of the Conclave are e.g. the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communications (AMEC) and the Institute for Public Relations (IPR).
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