Chris Kraft, Share Rocket
Businesses are learning that employee social networks have the power to raise awareness and increase audience engagement, and media companies have a need to measure and sell social sharing and reach.
Splash Media Founder Chris Kraft is CEO at Share Rocket – “a social media ratings company” that measures and compares company brands and employees within Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
New York TV Station Ratings
The idea is “to measure social audiences in marketplaces” similar to television and radio ratings services, Kraft says.
Local media markets offer unique opportunities and challenges. There is “a lot of entrenched thinking,” Kraft says. “The type of media that we’re measuring is a two-way conversation.”
Broadcasters are use to having a tower, and sending a message out of that tower, and maybe seeing the audience at a special event a couple of times a year. Social’s changed all of that. It’s now a dialogue. It’s now a conversation with your audience, and that’s a hard concept. – Chris Kraft
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) licensed broadcasters have been disrupted by mobile smartphone media that is “a finger push away,” Kraft says. “And it’s really changed the balance of that power equation, and now the audience has a lot more control.”
Academics have been writing about competition in “the marketplace of attention,” and data are increasingly important.
Share Rocket, in local television for example, measures the station brand, sub-brands (i.e. weather, sports, morning shows, etc.), and most recently individual journalists. “They’re really a strong advocate for their station brands,” Kraft says. “We’ve got some markets where as much as 30 percent of the social equity of a station rests in the talent as a whole.” The goal is to engage in community conversation while promoting station brand.
Share Rocket developed a social equity index (SEI) score that computes all activity, and it compares journalists within a local media market. “Our clients get to see a real-time index of how they’re performing,” Kraft says. “We teach our clients how to pull tactical insights,” manage “strategic insights,” and use an individual journalist “social scorecard,” Kraft says. In other words, all journalists are compared to each other, as top social media performers are highlighted and benchmarked.
Journalist Rankings
The method can be used for other businesses beyond radio, television and newspapers. Any company that understands the power of its owned media, would want to measure employees within social media.
Social Media Scoring
Facebook accounts for a whopping 95 to 97 percent of local TV market social media engagement, Kraft says. Organic reach of Facebook Live “is huge… is some of the most engaging content we measure across all of our clients’ platforms, Kraft says. Shared content is “the holy grail” of “reach amplification.”
Share Rocket uses an advertisers’ perspective to value social media engagement. Kraft says, “We think that local broadcasters, local publishers represent some of the safest harbors for advertising dollars” because of decades within communities.
It’s clear that audience trust matters in an age of ‘fake news’ and social media clutter.
The valuation of social media sharing is at the forefront of social marketing efforts. Matt McAllister, CEO of Kaleida, measures news and information flow and consumer sharing habits: “sharing and referral traffic have a significant and reliable relationship.”
This places employee advocacy promoted by Dynamic Signal, Edelman PR and others within a new context. Journalists, and all employees for that matter, will face new corporate pressures to not only be a “brand ambassador,’ but also to be social media influencers driving clicks and future business.
Jeremy Harris Lipschultz is author of Social Media Communication: Concepts, Practices, Data, Law and Ethics, second edition (2018).