Sorta thinking about the Influencer Scorecarding post I wrote the other day and Philip  Sheldrake, who created the social Web analytics ebook a year ago, along with K.D. Paine and the idea of what would be possible to create, or mashup with a little creativity AND a LOT of work using ideas from the 2009 Social Marketing Playbook (see the embedded ebook, below).
360i Social Marketing Playbook

This is a rough idea, and one that, frankly, needs a bit of work – but I’m going to throw it out to my readers as example of what could be done, with a little more creativity.   On Page 9 of the Playbook, Forrester’s Technographic Ladder is described as a way of categorizing customers, but the information is illustrative where it could have been … well, more… actionable.

Sure, the Playbook doesn’t try to provide actionable data, it’s more for ideas – and it gave me one (see the Technographic Ladder, below):

Imagine online customers (visitors) as Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators or Inactives, according to Forrester Social Technographics, however, were Social Technographics provided by Referral Source or by Campaign; it would much more valuable  for Social Media ROI than by Site or Segment, alone.

Here’s why – if you can tie specific efforts to drive traffic to a website with the increase of visitors who are participating (or “engaged) at one of the 6 Social Technographics levels, and your campaign is defined in terms of increasing engagment of, say, Creators and Joiners (say, from Facebook) you’d be able to prove the campaign succeeded or not.

But the data from Forrester doesn’t provide what’s needed to make those associations – or does it?  Perhaps the clues to it are there – but it needs work to assemble the data.  Here’s one way it could be done – but it’s much too labor intensive to do manually.

Use Comscore Media Metrix – for Referral Source

- Use Demographics and Forrester’s Social Technographics tool and create a Technographics profile of Unique Visitors to a site listed in Comscore (and it should, ideally, be updated monthly).  Take a company like Ford, not that Ford is doing so well, lately, but a least, it’s not bankrupt, like General Moters.

Use Consumer Profile Tool – plug in Media Metrix numbers at  http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html

Calculate the number of Unique Visitors that are Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators or Inactives from the Comscore raw data.  Using a Demographic Profile report:

Male 35-44      = 656,000   Unique Visitors

Female 35-44  = 559,000   Unique Visitors

Male Creators @ Ford      =          .21 x 656,000 =           137,760 UV

Male Critics @ Ford         =          .37 x 656,000 =           242,720 UV

Male Collectors @ Ford   =          .21 x 656,000 =           137,760 UV

Male Joiners @ Ford         =          .33 x 656,000 =           216,480 UV

You can look at any site this way – even though the categories overlap (there are more than 100% if you add all the categories your customers are in because many are more than one – i.e.:  a Critic and Collector, etc).

Use ComScore’s Source / Loss Report to estimate the number of visits from a site that are of each of the Technographics levels of participation or “engagement”:

Were traffic from all properties in Comscore broken down by Social Technographics  you could  get an average of how much traffic each month arriving  is of each Technographic level of activity and can dive deeper and look at the number of visitors from each site over time based on activity level (from Technographics which is a proxy for “Engagement” or the “Holy Grail” of Marketers) and decide if promotions are attracting the right types of visitors or the right tactics are being offered.

To finish off this post – as ideas come to me, like this one (I’m using the Playbook more as a way of focusing in on Influencer Score-carding – trying to make something that will go beyond what is currently offered.

I think many of the pieces of the puzzle are already present – but they haven’t yet been put together, at least, not well enough.