Metrics and Social Web Services: Quantitative Evidence for their Use and Impact
A one day workshop exploring ways in which metrics related to the use of Social Web services can be used in order to provide evidence of how the services are being used; allow comparisons to be made with one's peers and enable trends in usage to be identified.
Dirty Words
Impact, ROI, Marketing....All dirty, highly commercial words within the HE sector. However, in the current climate these issues are becoming more and more important to universities. Amber Thomas opened the workshop by explaining why these things need to be considered...The theme of impact ran as a thread throughout all of the day's discussions, emphasising the difficulty of using social media metrics to clearly demonstrate a change in behaviour.
Gaming and Data Quality
One of the major concerns for most participants was how well they could rely on evidence supplied by social media metrics.If universities are to make key strategic decisions based on this data, or if individual academics are to be assessed in any way based on their influence via social media activity, these issues need to be explored further.Here are some of the observations and concerns raised by participants, particularly in response to Brian Kelly's presentation, in which he warned of the need for healthy scepticism when considering metrics, and Martin Weller's presentation, in which he discussed the identity and role of the individual academic caught in the mix...Show Us The Money
Money was one of the key themes of the event - both the cost of collecting (or paying someone else to collect) social media metrics, and the role that money plays in telling a story with that data.
Ranjit Sidhu gave a rousing presentation, emphasising that "pound signs are good" and demonstrating clearly how metrics can be combined with offline data to create powerful arguments about the value of the social media engagement for the university.
Questions
The event raised a number of questions, many of which require further thought and exploration. Here is a selection, as shared via Twitter...
