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I often remind people that knowing how to use social media is not the same thing as knowing how to use it strategically and tactically.

I have trained many college students (in my classes and interns at work) who claim to know how to use social media at the start of the training. By the end of the training the invariable comment that they never thought it through strategically or tactically before.

Our strategy at the Center for American Progress and Center for American Progress Action Fund is to use social media to influence influencers so they will share our ideas with their audiences. Sometimes that is simply to get our policy reports, videos, and interactive graphics out to an influential audience. Sometimes our goal is to mobilize people to take action to influence policymakers.

This means we need tactics that ensure we recruit as many influencers to our audience as possible, that we work to deepen our relationships with those influencers, and that we provide value to those influencers so they have a reason to help us. This requires a lot of research to identify influencers and a lot of outreach to engage with them once they are identified.

We use a variety of tools to do our research, more tools to facilitate our engagement, and even more tools to measure our effectiveness.

Metrics are always a big challenge with social media. Yes, new tools are always emerging to help with this effort, but few, if any do everything needed. As a result, we are forced to used a multitude of tools and assemble our metrics from them.

Like any effort to measure success, this is involves operationalizing our success metrics. For example, one measure of success is driving people to our website to read our products. Tools like Bit.ly and HootSuite help us measure the number of clicks on the links we share, but experience shows that not every click results in a page view (discrepancies between Bit.ly and Google Analytics, for example, are different by an average of 8%, but that gap varies as the number of clicks increase).

Measuring influence is a lot harder. Size of audience is important, as is the number of Twitter and Facebook impressions generated by our posts, but that doesn’t translate directly into actual views (much as gross rating points for a TV ad doesn’t exactly translate into eyeballs on your ads). We like to use a combination of measures, including number of retweets on Twitter and the number of likes, shares, and comments on Facebook. As well, we like to look at the influence ratings for the people sharing our messages (on Twitter you can use Twitalyzer or Klout).

Moving forward, I expect that these tools will get better. One of the better premium services, Thrive from SmallAct.com has good metrics already and are developing enhancements as we speak.

So, returning to Jeff’s assessment, as you can see, a real social media strategy goes far beyond posting things to social media. You need clear goals, effective tactics, and a program to evaluate your efforts so you can refine them. Only then do you really have a social media strategy.

Debt, spending and taxes don’t exactly translate into blockbusters. Over the course of the past couple weeks, however, web videos on each subject have illustrated just how significant those issues are for engaged citizens.

A project called Bankrupting America set out earlier this year to escalate the issue of government spending by using innovative communications techniques. A major component was online video — not the easiest goal to fulfill given the platform, subject matter and audience.

After about four months of experimenting, Bankrupting America hit one out the park with its latest video and accompanying “Spending Fail Map.” Clay Broga and Michelle McAdoo ask people on the street about various government projects and whether they’re real or fake. It’s astonishing — and at times humorous — the stupid things our government funds.

“We tried to take a serious and concerning topic — how both parties in government are overspending our hard-earned taxpayer dollars in this time of economic need — and turn it into something that was both entertaining and informative,” McAdoo said.

The video recently hit viral status and is nearly at 150,000 views on YouTube. The best part? All it required was a little creativity and interviews on the street.

The office of House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) took the opposite approach. Its highly produced 13-minute documentary, “Obama’s Endgame,” chronicles the challenges of the national debt. Featuring interviews with Republican members of Congress, it’s a serious look at the consequences of inaction.

Conventional wisdom for years kept political and policy videos to about two minutes in length. The success of Cantor’s video shatters that notion. It currently has more than 100,000 views.

“Put simply, the public now accepts long-form online videos as a viable viewing choice; providing the opportunity to tell compelling stories and convey increasingly complex information,” writes Matt Lira, Cantor’s director of new media. “Undoubtedly, long-form video will play an important role in political communications going forward.”

Cantor’s video is significant for another reason: It builds on the success of the YouCut campaign. YouCut, conceived earlier this year as an interactive way to expose and eliminate runaway spending in Congress, has focused so far on smaller projects (albeit still expensive). As all politicians know — but some refuse to admit — it’s the big issues that need to be solved. It’s refreshing that Cantor is explaining the scale of the problem.

The third video making waves was produced by my colleague Brandon Stewart at The Heritage Foundation. It uses the concept of a theatrical trailer to tell the story of the impending tax hikes. It’s a clever way to communicate the seriousness of the issue in a non-wonky way.

“Obama’s Tax Hike: The Movie” has more than 25,000 views. More importantly, it has generated a robust debate about taxes on YouTube — in which Heritage is engaging. After all, isn’t that the point? A video could be hilarious and popular, but if it doesn’t advance the agenda, it’s a lost opportunity.

These three videos are just a few examples of the good work being done. They’re not the first and won’t be the last, but their success is an indication that Americans are seeking serious policy information in new ways.

Originally published by the Washington Examiner.

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A tough question came up in a conversation with a visiting group of Danish communications professionals last week — how do you actually measure the effectiveness of social media outreach? At that moment, the questioner seemed to be looking for some grand sweeping mechanism, but I think the reality is much more complicated: how you measure social media depends on what you’re trying to make it do.

Trying to Grab Hold of a Cloud

Here’s the problem: as with so much communications work, the effects of social media outreach can be quite diffuse. Say your advocacy campaign has a video on your issue out on YouTube — how do you measure the influence it has on the public mind? Some thing with that network of activists you’ve laboriously built up through Facebook — how do you find out how much good they’re actually doing you?

In traditional media outreach, we usually rely on proxy measurements to get hints of the answers to questions like that. How many press hits did we get, and in what publications? How many reporters participated in our media briefing calls? On the Hill, the answers are sometimes more concrete — your bill either passed or it didn’t — but most legislative change is (excruciatingly) incremental. Goals are often more long-term than getting a measure passed (or defeated) in a single session, and so we’re back to proxies.

Let’s apply this idea to social media and see what we get. A couple of quick considerations — first, don’t fall into the habit of focusing on what you can measure rather than on what matters. Proxies should be proxies, but they can become ends in themselves when we forget that they’re really just indicators of something more significant. Obsessing about process rather than results is a frequent trap in the nonprofit/advocacy space.

Second, online technologies often suffer BECAUSE they’re measurable — for instance, when a 1% click-through rate for online ads is considered to be good, people can start to question why they’re bothering to advertise on the ‘net at all. What’s not so obvious is that we usually don’t have equivalent numbers for other media (in most cases, you don’t have a mechanism in place to measure the conversion rate for a single print or TV ad), and the effective “click-through rate” for other forms of outreach may be WORSE!

Goals Provide Yardsticks

In the advocacy world, most outreach efforts involve one or more of three basic goals: trying to affect government legislation and/or regulation, trying to build a base of supporters for long-term fundraising and/or grassroots action, and trying to influence the broader public policy discussion. Right away, it’s obvious that the first two are going to have the most concrete measurables: for instance, you get what you want on the Hill (more likely, part of what you want) or you don’t. Likewise, support-building usually equals list-building, and you either build a list or you don’t.

For Hill/regulatory work, the measurables are likely to include counts of grassroots advocacy emails sent, constituent visits to district or DC offices, constituent calls to legislative offices, supporter quotes in mainstream media news stories, and letters to the editor in local newspapers. They may also include analogs to traditional media work, with blog hits and mentions in influential online discussion groups and listserves substituting for mainstream media hits. The most useful hints will probably come from your lobby team, since they can measure staff and member opinions directly — they’re likely to hear about it if you’re flooding congressional offices with calls. The ultimate measure of effectiveness is whether or not a congressmember comes to support your side, though it may be hard to isolate a single cause for the conversion.

Grassroots support-building is easier to gauge, since it almost always comes down to list-building. Regardless of whether you’re building your database through social media outreach, at in-person events, through phone banks, etc., you’re still building a list! Besides the raw numbers of supporters that come in through different channels, you can also look at the proclivity of members to take action — do the people you bring in through Facebook or through that clever online game contribute as much as people recruited through other means, for instance. A list is almost always a means to an end rather than an end in itself, but modern CRM (customer/constituent relations management) tools will let you slice and dice your database to help you get the most out of your outreach regardless of why (or how) you’re doing it.

The most difficult social media goal to measure is almost always going to be your influence on the public discussion. Here we’re close to traditional media work again, and the yardsticks shouldn’t sound too alien to anyone who’s spent time in a press shop. How many times are you mentioned in the top-level blogs in your topic area? How many bloggers were on your conference call, and how many posts resulted? How many times has your online video been viewed, what websites have embedded it on their pages, and was it picked up on Digg and other social news sites? How many people have put your promo graphic or widget on their MySpace profiles? You might also measure your effectiveness by your enemies — how many comments and video responses did your YouTube masterpiece spark, and how many hostile bloggers reacted violently to what you said?

If you’re really making a splash, you may see the results of your work in public opinion polling, but again it’ll be hard to separate out the influence of any one communications channel. A more obvious indicator is the spread of your message beyond the channels you’re using directly, for instance when your online video gets picked up on cable news and is seen by millions.

Let’s Get to Work

Going back to the original question, social media outreach in the political space is more measurable than it might seem at first glance, since you should have concrete goals to hold it up to (and if you don’t have concrete goals, you probably ought to start asking why you’re in this business at all!). It may not always be possible to pin down the exact results of a given outreach effort, but proxy measurements should let you compare the relative usefulness of different strategies, at the very least. Just remember, don’t focus on the measurable and forget about what you’re actually trying to get done.

– cpd