Razorfish, Ogilvy PR Launch Social Media Measurement tool

Social networking has always been really difficult to measure and evaluate. Without proper evaluation tools agencies and clients are skeptical about investing in a marketing project.

I believe that Ogilvy PR and Razorfish therefore decided to launch a new measurement tool in order to please their clients.

The measurement offering is based on the brand's "Network Promoter Score," which is described by Wikipedia as the following:

Companies obtain their Net Promoter Score by asking customers a single question on a 0 to 10 rating scale: "How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?". Based on their responses, customers can be categorized into one of three groups: Promoters (9-10 rating), Passives (7-8 rating), and Detractors (0-6 rating). The percentage of Detractors is then subtracted from the percentage of Promoters to obtain a Net Promoter score. A score of 75% or above is considered quite high.

Advertising Age describes Razorfish’s solution as follows:

Perhaps the closest to a social-web-based Net Promoter Score is something Razorfish plans to introduce this week: the SIM score, which stands for social influence marketing. Razorfish hopes SIM, in fact, becomes a standard as big as a Net Promoter score. It's a reflection of the total share of consumer conversations a brand has online and the degree to which consumers like or dislike the brand when they talk about it. The agency envisions marketers will track it over time and that it will correlate to business results.

They go on to describe Ogilvy PR’s solution

Ogilvy PR today will also launch a formula for calculating what it calls "conversation impact." It's meant to determine not the overall social-media health of a brand but rather the impact of a particular campaign. It's already using the tool, which takes into account reach at the top of the funnel, preference in the middle of the funnel and action at the bottom, to help evaluate a Tropicana campaign.


The Ogilvy solution does not make any sense whereas the Razorfish solution seems to be more thought out. Only time will tell which system will capture the imagination of clients.

My belief is that one independent system must prevail in order for an industry currency to be established and proper comparisons made. This can only be done if there are no self interests and the company who had developed the system is independent. Both Ogilvy PR and Razorfish will try and produce results that favor their own clients.