Week 3: A Conversation with Guest Speaker Sara Dunaj by Luisita Cordero

By UCLA X469.21 Student Luisita Cordero

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth measuring.

Luisita Cordero

During our “Best Practices in Social Media” class on April 16th Sara Dunaj, Princess Cruises’ social media lead, gave a presentation on analytics, influencer marketing, and customer care. Because I’m most interested in analytics, this blog post will focus on the first of these topics.

At Princess Cruises, “everything they do, they measure.” To paraphrase that key lesson from Sara, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth measuring. This message reinforces our class theme that good social media communications is always strategic.

Sara Dunaj

Ultimately, the aim of social media analytics is to measure how a brand’s social media activities advance its strategic goals. According to Sara, the whys and wherefores of analytics include identifying what works (and what doesn’t), anticipating trends, improving content and refining strategy. Rather than merely tracking data, smart analytics entails crafting a compelling narrative with that data.

To integrate the point above with what I learned from my Digital Analytics class last winter, analytics for the C-suite involves being able to tell a compelling brand story focused on the bottom line — in a two-minute pitch. The process begins with identifying metrics or KPIs (key performance indicators) linked to corporate objectives. Setting appropriate targets requires benchmarks that put the metrics into context. Sara emphasized competitive benchmarking, which can be accomplished by simply watching what your competitors are doing on social media. Certainly, a brand must also keep internal benchmarks, such as how it’s performing over time — either in comparison with a previous period or against its usual average. To that point, Sara suggested tracking how KPIs progress toward their respective annual goals as a sensible way to put metrics into context.

Sara’s final point on analytics pertained to choosing the right tools given a company’s budget. She said her “favorite price is free” and suggested we begin with the native analytics tools offered by each major social media platform. She gave the example of how Princess Cruises is trying to target a new segment of influencers based simply on eyeballing which of their recent Facebook posts get the most engagement. It turns out that two of their most popular posts had to do with travel agents, so Princess is targeting that group specifically. She identified analytics tools that range from free to full-service (i.e., very expensive). Finally, she offered a caveat on data that I rarely hear from analytics nerds. Sara said that if she had a truly limited budget, she’d forego the fancy and costly analytics and opt instead to spend that money directly on a campaign.

Sara went beyond the clichéd counsel that brands should seek out influencers with “authenticity.” She looks for integrity, and tries to discover social media personalities who are discriminating and won’t simply shill any mediocre brand, product or service for a quick buck. Integrity is a two-way street. Successful collaborations between brands and influencers rest on contracts that spell out each party’s obligations. When brands find influencers with integrity, they build the confidence to pursue a truly creative collaboration likely to result in a campaign that Sara describes as “more than the sum of its parts.”