Associations who have started getting their feet wet with social media are also in the process of trying to figure out how, exactly, one should measure Return on Engagement (ROE). I’m on a cross-council task force at ASAE (the very boringly named – my fault – “Cross-Council Task Force on Engagement”) the goal of which is to discuss what engagement looks like from a variety of different angles and departments, and to hopefully develop a framework which any association can use when trying to figure out what to measure in order to know if their social media efforts are achieving results.

Anyway I will be permanently on the lookout for interesting examples of how associations are doing this kind of measurement, and I’ll share them here.  I’ll call this post the start of the ROE Series. Let me know if you have a good process to share!

The first one I want to show you is really totally awesomesauce.

The National Science Teachers Association are developing what they call a “networking charge”. I talked to Howard Wahlberg, Assistant Executive Director, Membership and Chapter Relations, and Todd Wallace, CIO, and asked them what it’s all about.

The Networking Charge basically seeks to measure social capital or social influence. They set up a simulation, based on what Todd describes as “behavior we’ve observed in our original social networks: 1. the association model itself – engaging people with membership reminders, conferences, and publications; 2. our listservs – still popular with thousands of our members.”

Todd explains further,

“We have observed that there are some people who remain enthusiastic for our mission no matter what. We wanted to visualize how these true believers’ enthusiasm “rubs off” on their colleagues, making them enthusiastic for our mission, at least temporarily.”

Click here to view the Networking Charge Simulation

Todd continued,

“I wrote this simulation to explore the idea of “true believers” and how they influence others in a social network. Howard and I have identified “true believers” and “high charge” people in an anecdotal kind of way in the social networks we work with.

In this simulation, the people with the highest “charge” are red, and as their charge fades, their color fades through orange, yellow, blue, and finally, violet.

You’ll notice that where there are true believers or other high charge people, they tend to be surrounded by rings of orange, then yellow, then blue. The inner circle pick up their charge directly from the source, and so tend to be highly charged. They in turn pass along their slightly lower charge to those around them, and so on.

The distance between stick figures in the simulation represents social distance, which these days is often decoupled from physical distance. The movement of the figures represents changes in life circumstances, which can include greater or less access to various ways of socializing with colleagues.”

Howard added, “We used conference attendance as having a high weight, any referrals as having a pretty big weight. Then we look at book buying, years of membership, position title (assuming that a “science teacher coordinator” talks to more people than just a “science teacher”). …Then you set it to running, and all the little members swarm around and crowd and then de-crowd and then crowd again (over time) around the little dots with the highest networking “charge.” If you’ve done it right, it conforms to the ups and downs in your membership fairly well.”

Now, I am no sociologist, but the simulation bears some resemblance to the images from the now famous Framingham Heart Disease study which found (among lots of other things) that obesity and nicotine addiction could spread virally among real life social networks, with both appearing in clusters among groups of family members and (unrelated) friends:

So, similarly, in the simulation you can see that highly engaged people attract other engaged people and spread that energy around them, if only temporarily.

But wait! There’s more!

Here’s a second simulation that Todd built, this time “closely mimic[ing] the contacts our membership, publications, and conference departments have on our members, lapsed members, and nonmembers.”

Check it out here.

Be sure to read the explanatory notes at the bottom of the screen, and especially try “unchecking” some or all of the boxes on the right hand side (representing different touch points between the association and the member) and see what happens.

“Over time, each person’s charge fades gradually back to zero (except in the case of a few “true believers”) but each time a person has a positive contact with the association, whether with another member, through a communication from the association, or from attending a conference, that person’s charge is increased. When renewal time comes around, the likelihood that that person renews their membership is proportional to how high their charge is.”

Unbelievably cool. Now, as Todd said, these simulations are not based on the NSTA’s homebase social network but on more traditional data – but the next step is to build something similar that would create a visualization based on the social networking data.

I, for one, can’t wait to see it!! Thank you, Todd and Howard, for letting me share this!

Anyone else doing interesting experiments with social media metrics and data? Let us know. In the meantime, the ROE task force is open to all ASAE members, so if you are interested in joining the discussion just click here (login required) or go to RUTI and search groups for “Cross Council Task Force on Engagement”). Howard is on the task force with me, you can pick his brain about all this fascinating simulation stuff!