Monday, August 30, 2010

The "OBP of Social Media"

Really neat post by my buddy Papi on what he calls the OBP of Social Media. OBP is a baseball term that abbreviates On Base Percentage. In baseball, it's short hand doing something productive in your at bat. Here is the beginning of his article. Read below and then Click through.

A short digression, but it's really exciting for me to see my friends from Kellogg putting up posts that relay their experiences and opinions. That's one of the main reasons I started this blog 3 years ago. I wanted to create seed a hub for my Kellogg friends so we wouldn't lose track of each other. It's worked better than I ever could have hoped with many people contributing the bulk of my content. On the marketing front, their insights are invaluable as many of my friends now run big brands. Brands that spend a lot of money on marketing. I want to know what they are thinking and it's so cool to be able to read it on a lazy Sunday.

Papi:


"OBP, how can I ‘splain it?   It’s the fabled baseball metric that rose from obscurity proceeding Michael Lewis’s Moneyball.   OBP ( on-base percentage) indicates how good a hitter is at getting on base (duh), and is highly correlated with winning.   It’s so simple in its elegance, but was largely overlooked for many years by “old baseball”.   You get on base more, you score more, you win more. 


When evaluating brand efforts on social media efforts, there are so many metrics companies can use and few that are universally regarded as an effectiveness or brand health correlate.  The most powerful marketing, don’t forget, is positive word of mouth (or so the old adage goes).
I’ve been doing some social media benchmarking for brands in my marketspace (personal care goods).  I would propose that the ratio of “lovetweets” (positive engaging posts about a product, brand, company, advert) to deal/promotional retweets is the most revealing statistic about your brand’s standing with consumers."