New Campaign Metric: Social Chatter

The rising popularity of status updates on Twitter and Facebook is giving birth to a new way for advertisers to gauge the success of ads: whether they generate consumer buzz. Ad measurement firm Millward Brown is moving to establish that metric with a new service that will place digital word-of-mouth measurements for online campaigns alongside ad effectiveness metrics like awareness, brand lift and intent to purchase.

Millward Brown has hooked up with buzz monitor firm Cymfony to analyze online sentiment expressed on social networks, blogs and message forums. The social media measurements include volume, sentiment and share of voice. Cymfony is one of a host of companies that monitors social media. Others include Radian6 and Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Dynamic Logic used the capability to analyze an online campaign for a consumer products company that introduced a new product formula. Traditional brand metrics showed that awareness fell below the goal, even though traffic increased for the entire category. The social media buzz, however, showed that consumers who used the new formulation were pleased with it, indicating that marketing was the problem. Ali Rana, vp of emerging media at Dynamic Logic, said going beyond mere mentions to figure out sentiment is key for brands seeing if they're ads are working.

"Our clients have long been wanting holistic measurement," he said. "This helps fill in some of those gaps for now."

New Campaign Metric: Social Chatter