If you work with social media, you know how important it is to measure the success of a social media campaign. This challenging task is on everyone’s mind, with numerous startups claiming they’ve come up with the latest point system to perfectly assess how end users feel about a brand. When many of the best thinkers on social media gathered for the annual SXSW event earlier this month, solutions to measuring ROI emerged as a dominant theme and, according to some, was one of the conference’s biggest trending topics. Like everyone else, I’m eager, if not desperate, to find a truly effective measurement platform.

According to Shiv Singh, this problem has already been solved. In 2009, Singh lead a team at Razorfish to publish a document called the Social Influence Marketing (SIM) report. In this report the team coined the term “brand health” and suggested that the answers were lying within the tone of online conversations. A score, known as the SIM score, could be calculated by evaluating the online conversations of a brand and it’s competitors. Singh moved on to Pepsi and used this SIM score to measure the success of one of the most daring, expensive social media campaigns ever: Refresh Everything. Reading Singh’s post on SIM convinced me that he had created an all-encompassing solution; just what we’ve all been searching for.

Having been convinced that the SIM score was truly remarkable and on it’s way to becoming the gold standard in social analytics, I thought I’d dig around a bit and try to uncover the secrets behind the algorithm used to calculate the scores. Eventually I found the original document where SIM was announced, and finally found a graphic that shed light on the secret formula behind it all:

With a few meager percentage calculations, I found the formula pretty disappointing. It’s truly shocking to imagine that after spending millions of dollars on Refresh Everything, PepsiCo would use an impossibly simple, one-dimensional “formula” to prove the campaign’s success. Now that I’ve forgiven myself for being swept away by a not-so-hot solution, I’m beginning to acknowledge how my state of desperation adversely affected my judgement. Apparently, I’m not alone.

There’s an endless number of social analysis tools out there like Hootsuite, Klout, and Sysomos. But investors, who seem to be just as desperate as I am for a good solution, continue to pour millions of dollars into more analytics startups every day. Our appetite for analytics has yet to be sated, and with this lingering hunger, there is enormous opportunity for any company that can actually measure and prove ROI for social campaigns.

Who ever ends up building the analytics tool that I’m itching for, it better include the following features:

• A focus on the stages of user adoption, monitoring the transition from newby to superfan


• A balance between hard numbers and ethereal intangibles like tone


• Tiered reports with both real-time tactical feedback for social media professionals as well as high-level reports that prove strategic efficacy to execs and clients

In the meantime, my search for the holy grail continues, more cautiously then ever.