Establishing social media benchmarks in the news industry

As I discussed last week, Katie Delahaye explains the six steps to measuring internal and external communications within a corporation in chapter 10 of “Measure What Matters.” While last week I talked about “setting the tone” in internal communications, this week I am going to talk about Delahaye’s ‘third step,’ which deals with establishing benchmarks.

Although the book mainly discusses benchmarks from a marketing standpoint, I think that corporations can also use benchmarks to measure their own successes with social media as well.

For example, take news organizations. Major news organizations are competing with each other every day to get the best stories and to cover the biggest events; however, they also compete on social media. If CNN has specialized reporters in the field who are tweeting the newest, hottest information, then the New York Times needs to make sure that they are right there with them.

If CNN is using new social networks to share information, or links to their website, then the New York Times needs to do the same. If CNN is finding new ways to use Twitter to reach their followers, or their “community,” then the New York Times needs to follow suit.

While Delahaye says that most companies measure once or twice per year, news organizations in today’s world of ever-changing media need to measure almost daily. As news breaks by the minute, if competitor A is ahead of competitor B then competitor A will possibly steal some of competitor B’s following.

Social media measurement is also relatively easy to measure; not only can you see what kinds of things your competitor is covering, but you can also see how many followers they have and what kind of feedback they get from followers. The news organizations who are best at using social media are the ones that stay ahead of the curve and have a responsive audience, because as we know, social media is only effective if your audience is engaged.