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Social Metrics: The Return on Amplification

Posted on Jul 31, 2012 by in ThiNK First | 4 comments

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I’ve been thinking a lot about amplification recently. That’s what social media enables. Everyone and everything in social media is there to amplify. Your success is a function of how well you engage with people. The friendships and collaborations you create will make a huge difference. The tools you pick is also a critical part of your success in social media.

Every social media tool or service provider or consultant claims to be an amplifier. They aren’t lying! That’s the bonus and the challenge. We need to get a firm grip on amplification. Understanding amplification will help us define our strategies and be more effective.

Tools Amplify…

  • Triberr amplifies by letting you collaborate with other bloggers.
  • BufferApp amplifies by spreading your communications over time.
  • Blogs let you amplify by creating SEO findable content.
  • Twitter amplifies by being a network and by simplifying sharing and finding new friends.
  • Facebook amplifies your content among individual friend networks.
  • Listly amplifies your content by sourcing new content and driving traffic and engagement inside your blog.

People & Service Providers Amplify…

  • SEO gurus amplify your existing content.
  • Social Media Celebrities amplify your story/brand by mentioning you (influence in action!).
  • PR Strategiests get your story in the hands of journalists who mention you.

The list goes on. I began a list of tools that amplify. Feel free to add more suggestions. The key question is how do we measure amplification? What is the Return on Amplification? Is there an amplification benchmark? What makes one app amplify better than another? Is amplifcation like a cooking recipe? What is the ideal toolset combo?

The interesting thing about amplification is the way tools & people combine. Everyone in social media is looking for the perfect formula.  I’d argue focusing on amplification is one way to bring all your tools onto one comparable framework.

Total amplification is a function of the multiplication of all the components, but the math is a little more complex than A x B x C!

Here’s some more questions to think about.

  • How do we measure amplification? What is the uplift? What’s the baseline of activity?
  • What is the base unit of amplification – Page views?
  • How do we account for double counting. How to we attribute success by platform?
  • The real question is how do we decide which types of tools to use?
  • What type of amplification is most effective?
  • How does amplification turn into revenue?
I have a feeling this is going to be a repeating theme in my blog. I love lurkers (ROI of Lurkers) and I think I’m going to love amplification just as much. I can already feel another post germinating in my brain – when I think about it, the idea connects by to my Social Space model.
How about you? How much do you think about optimizing your social media efforts? Margie Clayman just put a stop to hers. Somewhere here all this stuff has to work. And it’s about time. We only have so much time.
What do you say?

Image Credit: BrewBooks via Flickr.com and Creative Commons

Nick Kellet (142 Posts)

Nick is co-founder the social curation platform Listly, that combines crowdsourcing, content curation and embedable lists to drive high-level community engagement, live inside your blog posts. Connect with Nick on Twitter · Linkedin, Facebook and G+ and follow his writing via his other guest posts and on his blogs at NickKellet.com and blog.list.ly


3 comments
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Livefyre
Livefyre

@nickkellet Hi Nick, one of the comments had been flagged as spam, it has been unflagged. You should be good to go!

martikonstant
martikonstant

The answer to your question is "It depends." Depends upon your base infrastructure (do you have a web presence?, do you have a database list that you currently communicate to?, do you communicate to subscribers on a regular basis?) Amplification is a function of where and how you established yourself or your company.

As a big fan of lean marketing, I suggest test & measure each one (or each variable if you want to talk about it like an equation) after you have established you or your company somewhere (PR launch, blog, website, etc.) Make decisions based on your level of effort and the results you obtain

Margie Clayman stopped her blog but is now choosing to select how she wants to spend her amplification dollars (on Carol Roth's blog, on her company blog, linkedin, etc.) She has determined that these other platforms are optimal for her (and she simply does not have all of the time).

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