Social Media Metrics: Practices of Measuring Brand equity and Reputation in Online

Social Collectives
Andreina Mandelli
Cosimo Accoto
Alessandro Mari
Contact: Andreina.mandelli@sdabocconi.it
Abstract
This paper presents a preliminary study on the professional practices of brand-related
measurements and reputation in social media. We reviewed both practitioner-based literature
and professional monitoring platforms and methodologies. We analyzed these procedures, and
drew preliminary conclusions about a more general framework, within which they can be
better understood and developed. We did it equipped with the insights provided by the
academic literature on branding in online environments and reputation management, and our
more general vision of markets as mediated conversations, which informs the research
program to which this study is part of.

Keywords
Internet, social media, conversations, brand equity, reputation, metrics.

Social Media Metrics: Practices of Measuring Brand equity and Reputation in Online
Social Collectives

Introduction
We present here a preliminary study on professional practices of brand equity and reputation
measurement in social media, based on the review of the most relevant literature and
professional services (monitoring platforms and methodologies) available in the field. We
introduce the analysis, and the discussion of findings, with relevant definitions and
information about social media and branding in these new communication environments.
Branding in social media
Social Media (or Web 2.0) has been defined by Costantinides and Fountain (2008) as "a
collection of open-source, interactive and user controlled online applications expanding the
experiences, knowledge and market power of the users as participants in business and social
processes. These applications support the creation of informal user's networks facilitating the
flow of ideas and knowledge by allowing the efficient generation, dissemination, sharing and
editing/refining of informational content. While the mass-market literature has widely
adopted the label of social media (social web or Web 2.0), the academic literature use
different labels such as social computing (Liu et alii 2009) or social software
(Hatzipanagos and Warburton, 2009, ed.; Candace Deans, 2009). Social media markets are
conceived as made by interactions and stories between people who use digital social
platforms as a new form of communication media and social environment. This transforms
people into content producers and therefore into media players, not only conversational
agents. From the implementation of social technologies in applications (Bell, 2009) such as,
to name a few, blogs, social networks, virtual worlds, content sharing, and wikis, it is possible
to readily identify the main conceptual foundations of social media: the concept of
Generativity (Zittrain 2008). The generative dimension of social media introduces the idea
and practices of user media production. Social media agency is ultimately a human process
through which an instance of collective action takes place in the form of a wiki page, forum
thread, blog comment, shared video, virtual playing or networking update. Consumer agency
emerges from a networked production and consumption process (Bruns, 2008). Social web
identifies an online place where people with a common interests can gather together to share
thoughts, comments, and opinions on products or brands (Weber, 2009). For some authors
like Chaffey and Smith (2008), this means that clusters or collectives of customers with
similar tastes and interests are connecting with each other to form new global niches,
segments and electronic tribes (Adams and Smith 2008; Cova and Cova, 2002). In this
perspective, the ideal customer for companies is no longer the one that buys the product, but
the one who contributes to a service or product over time, shares information and becomes a
partner, exchanging useful feedback and contributing to the brand project in a continuous
process of distributed value production. These actions, through social media, are putting
consumers closer to companies so they can be conceived as part of the organization
(Mandelli and Vianello, 2009). If the customers of a firm spend significant amounts of time
online, interacting with the company and with other customers, it creates an unexpected and
unprecedented opportunity for businesses to empower the traditional customer information
systems and to enrich the consumer online research methods (Fielding et alii, 2008.).
Consumers bring their needs and passions online, but also their skills and intelligence.
Consumer experience online builds around conversations and stories produced and planned
by occasional encounters with brands and other users. These kinds of relationships can
provide learning opportunities for the organization to increase sales, create positive word-of-

mouth, generate more effective market segmentation, increase website traffic, create stronger
brands, and create better product support and customer service for the company (Vianello and
Mandelli, 2009).
Why it is important to measure brand-related phenomena in Social Media
According to the extensive literature on brand equity in marketing (see Fuduric and Mandelli,
2009 for a recent review) and reputation management in corporate communication (Fombrun,
1996) brands make the difference in markets. Brand equity influences firms reputation and
performance. Measuring their value has been since long an important endeavor in the field. In
the social media environment, the mechanisms and tools for this practices offer some relevant
improvements. In particular, digital interactive environments offer the capability to gather in
an automatic, unobtrusive, and steady way a considerable amount of consumer behavior data.
Furthermore, this data is collected in real-time and at a fraction of the cost of traditional
market research. The Web can be viewed as an enormous distributed laboratory for studying
human behavior in a virtual digital environment (Baldi et alii, 2003). From a data analysis
viewpoint, the Web provides rich opportunities to gather observational data on a large-scale
and to use this data to construct, test, reject, and adapt models of how humans behave in the
Web environment. As also stated in Breakenridge (2008), a company should use the flexible
2.0 research thats available on the internet from the free search engines to the paid service
providers with amazing technological advances to allow its brands to more than just
survive, but to thrive in fast-moving, highly competitive, and constantly changing
environment.
These types of models are of broad interest across a wide variety of fields such as: the social
scientist who wishes to better understand the social implications of Web usage, the humanmachine interface specialist who wishes to design better software tools for information access
to the Web, the network engineer who seeks a better understanding of the human mechanism
that contribute to aggregate network traffic patterns, and the e-commerce sales manager who
wants to better predict which factors influence the Web shopping behavior of a site-user. The
Internet (and the social media, in particular) can be thought of like a massive focus group
with uninhibited customers offering up their thoughts for free (Scott 2009). Companies that
do not care about reviews and discussions of their products or services found on social media
are living dangerously. In fact, customer-generated (or expert-generated) information about a
specific brand should be considered important and valuable as more formal market and media
research. In addition, in the fast-changing and turbulent markets of today, it is particularly
important to conduct brand research on a regular basis because consumer behavior can change
much faster than any formal market research program.
Li C. and Bernoff J. (2008) identified two relevant listening strategies on the web: either set
up your own private community or begin brand monitoring in blogs, micro-blogging, social
networking, video sharing, etc.. In fact, many web resources are available to help firms
monitor messaging and editorial coverage in Web 2.0. Social media measurement (also,
social media analytics) is still in its infancy stage, but it enables, for instance, a company to
evaluate whether conversations on a topic are increasing in size or decreasing, if the number
of participants in a particular conversation compared to others is bigger or smaller, if the
conversation on the negative side increases or if there is positive buzz around a brand or a
product. In fact, the newest linguistic models allows one to analyze the content and the
tonality of a story, even revealing whether the speaker is male or female (Breakenridge,
2008). However, there also are significant limits to these models. They are both technical and
conceptual and suffer from problems like privacy issues, incomplete raw data, oversize
amount of information, abstractions and assumptions, semantic complexity, and the difficulty

connect data to actions (the problem of the actionable metrics, see Burby and Atchison,
2007).
From the conceptual standpoint, what is missing from this system is a robust framework
which allows companies to 1) better understand what brands can do in social media, for
improving their equity through their participation to these social collectives; 2) and how these
new market encounters and narratives can help build better knowledge and support for action.
As Mandelli (2005) suggests, A more integrated and communication based research agenda
should be developed, so to uncover the complex relationship between the processes of
learning and brand building in consumer communities.
Our study
This paper presents a preliminary study on the use of brand-related metrics by marketing and
communication practitioners in social media. We reviewed both practitioner-based literature
(from 2007 to 2009) and actual monitoring platforms and methodologies. A selected list of
the texts reviewed is provided in the bibliography. We build our knowledge of the
methodologies adopted in the field, out of the analysis of the most important platforms and
procedures proposed and adopted by major companies and brand analysts. We based the
selection of these platforms on the list contained in the Forrester Wave Listening Platforms
Study Q1 09 and Forrester Wave Web Analytics Q3 09 study, two authoritative reports on
global best practices in the field (fig. 1 Appendix 1).
We reviewed all these procedures with the help of the insights provided by the academic
literature on marketing in online environments (Hoffman and Novack, 1996; Mandelli, 1998;
Christodoulides and de Chernatony, 2004) and our more general vision on markets as
mediated conversations (Mandelli and Snehota, 2008; Mandelli, 2010).
At this stage of our project we have not done a quantitative/systematic analysis of these
platforms. The approach we used is exploratory and preliminary to a more in-depth analysis
of these methods and instruments. Our aim was to find commonalities in the different
methodologies proposed and used, and start building a list of the most important metrics,
classifying them in relevant categories, according to the different objectives and
methodologies adopted. This should help us link back these practices to a more conceptual
framework that we are building, with the help of academic literature on brand equity metrics,
and original theorizing on the new nature of markets (Mandelli and Snehota, 2008), and
brand-customer relationships in markets as mediated conversations (Mandelli, 2010).
Monitoring the conversations: practices in the field
Here we describe the metrics adopted in the professional procedures examined, and classify
them in relevant categories. We warn that these categories are not so distinct, and somewhat
overlap:
1) Customer engagement
The concept of engagement is used to describe the involvement of customers in the online
environment. Practitioners use Customer Engagement (CE) as a metric for measuring the
degree and depth of visitor interaction against a clearly defined set of goals. Originally
referring to the rich media internet applications, more recently the concept has shifted to the
social media environment (see IAB, 2009) to monitor and track the practices of social agency.
Objectives and metrics
The general aim of customer engagement measurement is to describe and evaluate the online
consumer interaction with brands, beyond the first-order metrics (for instance, page views and
unique visitors), and according with some defined business objectives (Jackson, 2009).
Various attempts to overcome the original audiometric level (page-centric and click-centric)
has been made to address the new dimensions of consumer engagement. The measurement

industry nowadays uses two audiometric approach: (1) time and (2) event (or some
combinations of them). On one hand, the idea is that the amount of time spent on a site (or
page, content, application and so on) can be a significant measure of the engagement of the
customer. On the other hand it is assumed that the tracking of specific application based interactions (with video players, widget applications, instant messenger and so on) can give a more
precise idea of this consumer-based phenomenon.
Engagement can also be conceptualized (and measured) as a process, with subsequent steps,
in a so-called engagement funnel. A relevant problem, in this metric discourse, is the
capability to correctly assign the attribution of engagement conversion to specific steps (in
the engagement funnel process), and to calculate, consequently, cost per and return on
investment of specific brand engagement-stimulating actions. This is framed in the more
general discussion about the need for developing better actionable metrics (Burby and
Atchison, 2007).
To quantify the user engagement, a pletora of metrics (especially in form of key performance
indicators or KPI) is used (for ex. Video uploads, see the list in table 1- Appendix 2),
according to the business goals and the typology or steps of events tracked.
Tools and techniques
Social media practitioners use web analytics techniques (Peterson, 2005, 2006; Kaushik,
2007,2009) for measuring Customer Engagement. In particular, digital publishers use the log
files to track and analyze (Jansen et alii, 2009) or use more sophisticated content tagging
instruments. In addition, the online marketers collect most of the data from online metered
panels (Bermejo, 2008), for socio-demographic profiling and competitive benchmarking.
2) Buzz
Buzz or Marketing Buzz has been defined as the interaction of consumers and users of a
product or service, that serve to amplify the original marketing message (Greg, 2006). The
aim of buzz marketing is creating positive word of mouth around a product by turning
selected consumers into spontaneous carriers of the message (Salzman M.L., Matathia I. and
OReally A., 2003; Hughes M., 2005; Rosen E., 2002). In this respect, the term buzz
monitoring indentifies the task of tracking the consumer responses to commercial services and
products.
Many firms and researchers operating in social media are trying to develop instruments and
algorithms to monitor, track, and report (quantitatively and qualitatively) what they call the
voice of customers.
To monitor these customers, companies have to be constantly informed about the talks around
the brand on the web (such as posts, comments, reviews, etc.) and, more recently, in terms of
the so-called opinion mining and sentiment analysis. According to Pang And Lee (2008),
this refers to computational treatment of (in alphabetical order) opinion, sentiment, and
subjectivity in text. Such work has come to be known as opinion mining, sentiment analysis,
and/or subjectivity analysis. The phrases review mining and appraisal extraction have been
used too. These techniques and algorithms can also have a relevant role in enabling other
social technologies like recommendations systems. These analyses can be performed also at
a very granular level, for specific targets or topics (see the list in table 1 Appendix 2).
Tools and techniques
- Enterprise Listening Platforms:
The measurement of buzz can be made with the help of software, that takes into consideration
the discussions on the web, in order to monitor the impact of social media campaigns on
consumer conversations (Have the customers received the message? How are they responding
to it? What reactions does the message generate?) These tools are called Enterprise Listening
Platforms, so-called ELP. Companies using the dedicated buzz monitoring procedures
(usually using a complex system of crawling, indexing and retrieval of information tools) can

rely on a dynamic database, with information coming from a variable number of social media
(blogs, social networks, groups, boards of discussion, forums, and other consumer-generated
media platforms).
- Text Mining Tools
The text mining tools activate algorithmic procedures to mine large volumes of unstructured
data (Song and Wu, 2009), using methods derived from data mining, machine learning,
natural language processing, information retrieval, and knowledge management. Text mining
technology can be used to assist in finding relevant or novel information regarding the brands
the company wants to monitor.
We have to say here that, even if in the illustration of the procedures this is not always made
clear, it is important that machine-based analyses are supported by human-based, qualitative
and interpretive analysis of the conversations and texts, for better guiding the application of
the simplified software interpretation rules.
- Site Analytics
The web analytics tools can be applied to track the activity of the company on different
social media channels (Croll and Power, 2009). Companies do not surf the web searching for
discussions about the particular brand. These tools operate by looking at the various responses
to the company activities and compare the results obtained for each social media channel. It is
then possible, by setting the right research parameters, to understand the response rate of the
customers in terms of leads, transactions and content consumption (Murdough, 2009).
3) Brand advocacy
Not all products may generate enthusiastic sentiments among consumers, even if some
products stimulate consumer passions (Mandelli, 2005). The brand advocacy models respond
to the necessity of the firms to understand who are the customers that positively talk about the
brand, and how likely they are to promote it. These instruments can be useful to understand
the level of affection toward the brand and also the possibility of positive word-of-mouth
generation. They are usually linked to buzz analysis procedures. See the list of metrics in
table 1 (Appendix 2).
Tools and techniques
These analyses made following a qualitative approach trademarked with different labels (Net
promoter Score, Advocacy Index, Customer Focused Insight Quotient, etc.). Through this
method, companies can measure and capture not only advocacy, but also negative opinions
and competitor recommendations. The method used to measure brand advocacy is not equal
for all the operators. Some ask directly to their customers (using a survey-like approach)
about the willingness to suggest a brand, while others try to analyze which brands the
customers have already suggested to their peers. There are currently several discussions
circulating among professionals on the validity of these methods, also compared to other
procedures, for ex. Customer satisfaction analysis (Keiningham et alii, 2008). Many consider
the first approach to be incorrect because it is based only on the question of Would you
suggest this brand/product to a friend? which measure intent, but not action. A more popular
method is becoming the monitoring of the conversations, passively observing the number of
customers sponsoring certain products. At this moment the discussion about the validity and
reliability of each of these methods is open and still lacks theoretical support from the
academic world.
4) Network influencer
The influencer analysis is based on the concept that not all the talkers (fans as well as
detractors) have the equal importance in the discussion. Some peers (the influencers) guide
discussions and act as opinion leaders. In a socio-metric perspective, the industry uses the
well-established social network analysis techniques in order to mine, map and measure the

type of relationships between nodes in networks in terms of proximity and density (see the list
of metrics in table 1- Appendix 2).
A referral approach to determine the value of influencing power among peers (customer
referral value) is proposed by Iyengar et alii (2009) in Do Friends Influence Purchases in a
Social Network?. It starts with three questions: (a) Do friends influence purchases of a user
in a social network? (b) Which users are more influenced by this social pressure? (c) What is
the impact of this social influence in terms of changes in sales and revenues? The authors
outlines a complex and evolving dynamics in social consumer behavior. Although many tools
have been developed to measure this important aspect of the conversation, some experts seem
to be skeptical about them. As Gillin (2007) pointed out, What is sure is that influence is
hard to measure; so many variables are involved that even the most astute measurement firms
cannot give definitive guidelines to measure it.
Tools and techniques
Using different methods such as link analysis, percolation theory and epidemic models, social
network analysis seeks to mine and describe the so-called FOAF ecology (friend-of-a-friend).
This describes networks of relations and ties, pulling out the prominent patterns in such
relationships, tracing the flow and direction of information (and other resources), and
discovering the power and velocity of influencing. The principal methods for analyzing the
influencers has been introduced by Razorfish: The SIM (Social Influence Marketing) Score.
This score is the result of net sentiment on share of voice. This is first obtained through
the data received by an ELP (in this case TNS Cymfony) and by an offline buzz measurement
tool. These methods are a good example of the integrated, but often also overlapping, nature
of most of the procedures adopted.
Besides the analysis of the most relevant platforms, we explored the professional literature, in
order to complement the analysis of the user-centric methods (adopted in the listening and
web analytic platforms) with the illustration of monitoring procedures and metrics applied at
different levels of analysis; these might be useful for starting build a more general framework
of how to monitor communication and brands in social media.
Beyond customer-centric procedures: organization-centric analyses
Most of the metrics we examined so far measure phenomena at the individual level (for ex
Customer Engagement). Few others (for example: volume of discussion) consider the network
as a unit of analysis. Through our exploration we realized that there are several procedures for
measuring social media brand-related phenomena and reputation at the brand/organization
unit of analysis. We are here referring to the methodologies of data collection and analysis
that more or less agree on the labeled terminology of:
Brand engagement analysis
Reputation analysis
Brand engagement analysis (see for ex. The methodology Engagement DB at
www.engagementdb.com) evaluates and rank the activism and social media presence of the
top 100 global brands, through interviews and web analysis. This analysis offer a rich account
of best practices in social media, but also a brand-engagement segmentation, with groups
based on the level of activism: mavens, butterflies, selectives and wallflowers. This
analysis, when conducted at the industry level, provides useful competitive information.
Reputation analysis is, instead, the study of the social value of a brand/corporation, measured
through the analysis of media coverage, stakeholders esteem and corporate participation to
social life (social responsibility). With the explosion of social media these analyses have
required to be updated and supported by technology-enhanced procedures. Many
communication and PR agencies offer these services to their clients. They include these
procedures in stable/continuous monitoring programs of corporate reputation in social media,

but also in procedures for alerting companies about the need for managing reputation crisis
or social threats online. Of course some of these analyses build on conversation monitoring,
typical of the consumer-centered procedures described above (customer engagement, buzz,
brand advocacy and influencer analyses), and even the influencer analysis (when focused
on bloggers) can be considered an updated version of media coverage evaluation. But what
changes here is the breadth of monitoring goals, units of analysis (individual, organization,
network level), program (business partners, investors, and civic society are strategic actors in
the game), and perspectives (organizations monitor corporate reputation from the brand, the
industry or a more general social perspective).
The problem with these practices seem located in the conceptual and methodological
weakness of the procedures used. There is a diffused confusion between brand image and firm
reputation, and a confusion between brand image and conversation about brands. Brand
advocacy cannot be considered as an operationalization of brand image nor as a proxy of firm
reputation. It is not possible to equate brand-related talk with brand perceptions, and any of
them with the aggregated attitudes of different stakeholders, which form reputation (Dowling,
2001).
Comments and Conclusive remarks
The analysis shows a picture of the practices in the field, which demonstrates a greater
maturity compared to just a couple of years ago, when brands and technology providers
started to consider social media metrics an interesting area of application and management
(Forrester, 2009). We now see that there are several technology-supported methodologies and
a growing set of metrics which can be applied to measure relevant phenomena in social media
spaces.
We classified these metrics into 4 categories: customer engagement, buzz, brand advocacy
and influencer analysis. We consider this a useful first effort in the project of analyzing
systematically what actors in the field are doing for monitoring and measuring relevant
communication and brand-related phenomena in social media. This analysis and classification
also helps us build conceptual frameworks, which can support discussion in the field and a
more robust development of methods and tools supporting brand management. As we said,
there are several limits not only in these practices but also in our analysis. The most evident
weakness regards the temptative and preliminary nature of our classification. As also the
practitioners often recognize, many of these metrics and methodologies are redundant and at
least partly overlap, because they are developed in different contexts and for serving different
knowledge and strategy goals. We still consider them a valuable basis for future work on the
subject, because they help us start building the link between adopted metrics and the
identified goals, promoted by Murdough (2009).
The author illustrates the main phases of the social media measurement process (see figure 2
Appendix 1), linking strictly the decisions about metrics to social media strategy. The phases
are: 1) concept (which defines the general goals for the brand), 2) definition (outlining
strategy), 3) design (enumerating social tactics and measurement programs); 4) deployment
(implementation), 5) optimization (identifying actionable opportunities for adaption.
Murdough (2009) also includes a useful first classification of units of analysis for social
media monitoring, that are:

Reach (network level)

Discussions (individual level)

Outcomes (individual level)

Fuduric and Mandelli (2009) summarize this framework in table 2 (Appendix 2).
Advancing the objective of establishing a clear link between measurement and brand
objectives, we find useful to include the new consumer-centric metrics, that we have reviewed

above, into the conceptual framework proposed by Christodoulides and De Chernatony

(2004), in their effort of building an integrated picture of brand equity offline and online. As
shown in tab. 3 (Appendix 2) social media branding provide useful information to brands, at
their different steps of evolution: differentiation, positioning, personality, vision and added
value.
Brand engagement and reputation analysis procedures (both organization-centric) enlarge the
scope of our measurement possibilities, offering information on competitive social media
presence of the brand, and the more general social value of corporations. We can include all
the 6 types of brand-related social media monitoring procedures in a more general framework,
considering the different units of analysis and focal perspectives involved. We summarize this
last analysis in figure 3 (Appendix 1).
Our study has pointed out different issues concerned with the current measurement
methodologies and metrics practices. Sophisticated software has been recently developed,
increasing the possibility to measure dimensions of social media conversations that were not
possible to measure before. This possibility is translated into a large/differentiated offering by
specialists in the field, and the proliferation of specialized tools and services. The operators
claim the possibility of integration of these instruments, for giving a larger view on different
aspects of the social media conversations. But this seems difficult at this stage, because of
lack of standardization of audiometric concepts and technical terminology (more recently
mitigated by the attempts of industry associations as IAB and WOMMA to set standard
guidelines), and because of the overlapping scope of some of these methodologies. There is
even a scarce reliability of these tools, giving the discrepancy of data collected with different
measurement platforms.
Another problematic issue regards the scarcity of new competences, which integrate
marketing and PR knowledge with social media culture and practices. An example of how
this competence gap can create validity problems in the measurement practices in the field is
the confusion between conversations, brand image and reputation that we mentioned in the
previous paragraph. A clear understanding of the difference (and relationship) between
brand-related talk (interpersonal communication), brand image (perceptions) and reputation
(aggregated attitudes and macro-level standing) is needed. Besides this, it is important to
consider the complex role and reciprocal impact of different types and sources of
communication. Social media conversations participate to a process of influence along with
brand communication (marketing and corporate communication) and professional media. All
these sources and activities impact on the image that consumers (and other stakeholders) form
about the products and the firms (fig. 4).
The last issue regards the difficulty of applying general measurement frameworks to specific
business and brand contexts. Considering the technology load of most of these measurement
techniques, we wish to conclude this study calling the attention of the reader on the possible
danger that can originate from a mechanical adoption of the tools available, as often happens
when innovative phenomena challenge established procedures and practices of managers. It
becomes attractive, in the short-term, to rely on new procedures and practices incorporated in
standards and ready-to-use technology tools. This does not help companies to successfully
face the new market challenges. Data collection and analysis is expensive, even in the world
of digital communication and overload of information puts strain on the efficiency of brand
management. The integrated tools for data collection and analysis from social media should
be considered, as they are, tools for supporting strategy making; they cannot substitute for it.
This does not mean that we should include social media research into a rigid plan and result
approach, since we know that behavioristic and planning-type versions of control, in complex
and unpredictable social collectives, do not work well (Mandelli, 2010). We can, however, try
to improve our control on performance through intelligence. If traditional branding was based

on a simplified model of the relationship between communication and consumer behaviour

(in the so-called communication effects tradition), this simplification does not work well for
branding in social media. The complexity of the system and the unpredictability of directions
in conversations undermine this possibility. Metrics and monitoring should be considered, in
these innovative branding environments (if not ever), as distributed and dynamic social
intelligence, which build out - but also bridge - local interactions and conversations, and help
the agents make sense of their past and future, in the organizing of their actions (Mandelli,
2010).

APPENDIX 1
Fig. 1 - List of platforms contained in the Forrester Wave Listening Platforms Study Q1 09

and Forrester Wave Web Analytics Study Q3 09.

Source: Forrester, The Forrester Wave: Listening Platforms, by Suresh Vittal, Q1 & Q3,
2009.

Figure 2 - The main phases of the social media measurement process

Source: Murdough C. (2009).

Figure 3 - Social media metrics: a general framework for the analysis

Focal perspective
Brand
Consumer
engagement
Individual

Buzzanalysis
Brand advocacy

Unit of
analysis

Reputation
analysis

Organization

Reputation
analysis

Buzzanalysis

Network

Reputation
analysis

Industry/
economy

Society

Consumer
engagement

Customer
engagement

Buzzanalysis

Buzzanalysis

Brand advocacy
Reputation
analysis
Brand
engagement

Reputation
analysis
Reputation
analysis

Reputation
analysis

Buzzanalysis

Buzzanalysis

Reputation
analysis

Reputation
analysis

Source: Our elaboration

Fig. 4 Conversations, brands image and reputation

Media
texts

Conversations

Brand
image

Brand
communication
texts

Source: Mandelli, 2010

Reputation

APPENDIX 2
Tab. 1 - List of Metrics

Metrics
Customer
engagement

Average time played

Numbers of start, reward, stop of player
Completion rate
Conversion rate
Volume of video uploads
Numbers of widget/application installs
Widgets placements
Configurator actions (personalization)
Details views (zoom-in, zoom-out)
Video views and reviews
Registrations or option-in
Content downloads
Posts, tags, revisions
Recency, frequency
Video engagement rate
Cost per engaged visit

Buzz
measurement

The volume of discussions around the brand

Post volume, occurrences, comments
Volume per author
Mentions per social media channel
Conversation index (ratio posts/comments)
The reach level obtained by the social media presence
Buzz competitive performance analysis
Audience composition/segmentation;
Quality of the discussion around the brand/sentiment
Brand perceptions and quality of the attributes
Topics and tonality of comments

Brand
advocacy

Numbers of recommendations
Products reviews and feedback
Embedded contents
Sharing rate
Adoption rate

Network
influencer

Fan contributions/creations (pages, groups,)

Number of new product ideas
Supporting proneness
Customer loyalty/retention
Bookmarks, votes, ratings

Numbers of followers
Ratio followers
Numbers of re-twitters
Pass-along rate
Velocity of spread of the idea/meme/message
Acceleration effect
Number of incoming links to a profile, resource
Numbers of invites
Numbers of bookmarks
Credibility/Authority
Rss subscribers
Relevance and Trust
Popularity

Source: Our Elaboration

Table 2 Framework

Phase
Concept

Definition

Design

Deployment

Optimization

Activity

Output

1.Mapping measurement objectives

1. Goals
2. Identifying key KPIs
2. Objectives
3.Establishing performance benchmarks
3. Metrics
1.Itemize insight questions
1. Reach
2.Illustrate the analysis approach
2. Discussions
3.determine the frequency of performance 3. Outcomes
evaluation and timing
1.Establishing performance data sources and/or Samples of social media
methodologies
insight tools and data
2.Enumerating specific technical tracking hooks sources to be used
and manual interventions
3.Set up, configure or customize performance
reporting tools
1.Conducting quality assurance of data collection methods
2.Validation of performance reports
3.Building data infrastructure
Reporting and insight

Source: Elaboration from Murdough (2009) in Fuduric M., Mandelli A. (2009).

Table 3 Old and New Brand Equity Metrics

Source: Our elaboration, starting from Christodoulides and De Chernatony (2004)

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