CDPR108 - Week 9 - Action, Attitude and Attention

There are many things that aid the success of a social web program but one of the most important is being able to measure your efforts. The 3 A's - Action, Attitude and Attention - are great tools for measuring social web activity.

The concept of "Action" are items that require your audience to take action. Taking action on social media is a different concept than you might think. Liking something on Facebook or re-tweeting on Twitter would be considered taking action. The business has posted something that allows you to take action and include your thoughts or ideas. Most social media tools work best when audiences take action - for example a discussion, or a poll. All of these things can then be measured which will then let you know if your social media strategies are successful. Of course the success of these actions would be determined by the business objectives that were laid out. 

The concept of "Attitude" when it comes to a social web program would be the perception that your audience/consumers have of your business/brand/identity. Through a social media program a company/business can easily measure their audience's attitude through the discussions on social media. This would include comments on Facebook posts; mentions on Twitter. While every company wants a positive attitude, the company needs to have a larger goal in mind when it comes to the concept of "Attitude." If the company has had a lot of negativity in the past, perhaps the business objective is to better respond to this negativity through social media platforms. Or perhaps there has been no known attitude toward the business, so having an understanding - whether positive or negative - could be the goal. We have learned that it is not always important to just have positive comments on social media platforms. It is important to have some negative feedback or negative perceptions and then properly respond to these in a public forum. This shows transparency and integrity. 

The concept of "Attention" can be easily measured these days and of course a business always wants a LOT of attention. The goal would be to see large numbers of people visiting your website, liking your Facebook page, following you on Twitter, responding to you on blog posts, etc. Perhaps your business/company had a goal of more Facebook followers, or more visits to your website. When it comes to attention, it is important to have a specific goal in mind. In order to measure the attention, you need to know where you started so you can measure where you are headed. 

As with any business plan, you need to know where you are starting from and where you plan to end up in order to measure the success of your social media plan through action, attitude and attention.