The second time it has met this year and I was determined not to miss it. Measurement camp draws together social media types from PR agencies, media agencies, digital, researchers, clientside to share the latest case studies and thinking in social media. And to brainstorm how to measure social media campaigns better. Well there was no breakout sessions this evening unfortunately because that is always one of the best places for learning. Will McInnes the founder of Measurementcamp wasn't able to be there. But Martin Uttley and Katie Colbourne have taken over the running of it which means I hope that the event will return to its monthly slot.
We had 3 speakers: Ciaran Norris talking about Mindshare's approach to measuring social media campaigns which has to take into account the monitoring of much wider campaign activity given that Mindshare is a media company. In his opinion most tracking is just of the level of noise. When what also needs measuring is the sentiment, the topics, where the conversations are taking place and who is having the conversations. They use symphony. His summary point was that numbers are meaningless without knowing the context.
Second on was Caroline Rolfe - in mid swing from the Arcadia vine to the Links of London vine which she joins in a week's time. She provided examples from Jack Wills, Estee Lauder, Bodens, Burtons and Debenhams - each using social media campaigns in fundamentally different ways to ver different effects. Because of the scepticism within Arcadia to what social media can achieve she didn't have access to agencies so had to develop campaign activity herself and benchmark it carefully. Inevitably this meant that the scale of what she was doing came across as quite small - ideal for luxury and exclusive opinion leaders but rarely stretching in to a mass market. She described herself as returning to the luxury category. Where I assume she will be able to target small groups very effectively.
The third speaker was Alice Ratcliffe of Shoppulse a fashion startup. This was fascinating at some times more like standup because Alice was quite open about the fact that she had no resources so had had to teach herself how to use social media channels. `Using a spreadsheet to monitor competitor activity. And unique signature values to ensure she could measure site traffic from each social media source. There is nothing like the enthusiasm and indepth experience of a recent convert. From a standing start this blog is now in the top 100 fashion blogs in the UK and is planning to put on its own even alongside London Fashion Week. Really interesting to see how social media was being used to drive a startup when there was limited resources and every social activity had to materially add to the bottom line.
That done we repaired to the pub for an evenings eclectic chat!
