By Douglas Quenqua
Ad network Federated Media Publishing is launching a new suite of tools to help marketers measure ad campaigns across social media.
The San Francisco-based network is partnering with a litany of big-name Web properties to collect the necessary data for its Conversational Marketing Toolbox program, including Google, Yahoo, Twitter, comScore and DoubleClick. The Toolbox will be officially unveiled at FM's 2008 Conversational Marketing Summit today in San Francisco.
The CM Toolbox allows marketers to follow a number of metrics unique to social media, in addition to standard measurements like click-through rates and impressions. Actions like Twitter mentions, blog posts and comments, widget adoption and social bookmarking are tracked and scored, giving marketers a comprehensive snapshot of brand activity.
"When and where is your brand being Tweeted, and how many times? What blogs are mentioning it, and what do the comments look like? How many friends are you getting on Facebook? The CM Toolbox rolls all that up into a customized set of data points that marketers can review and see how their campaign is going," said Matthew DiPietro, marketing manager for FM.
DiPietro stressed that the measurement system will be customized for each client to reflect the specific media they wish to follow.
The toolbox is launching in beta mode with a handful of FM's largest clients on board, including Intel, Best Buy, and American Express. DiPietro said FM expects the offering to be available to all FM clients as a "value-added service" by Q1 of 2009.
The toolbox is hardly the first program that claims to help marketers measure social media activity. A new trade association, SMAC, launched last month specifically to find ways to do just that. However, the inclusion of partners like Google and Twitter is noteworthy, if only that it signals an eagerness to work with networks like FM to have their media measured for brand activity.
"Consumers do more than view Web pages and click on ads," said Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist for Google, in a written statement. "They engage with Web sites and marketing messages in ways that require a dramatic evolution in how companies measure success. I am happy to see others in the industry recognizing the need for a collaborative push to understand the valuable nuances of online visitor behavior."
DiPietro said for partners such as Google, the CM Toolbox program was attractive because "it is essentially a lead-generation and exposure tool for them, to get people used to their data and how to work with them."
