Two agencies, one with roots in the advertising world (Razorfish) and one with roots in PR (Ogilvy PR) launched new social media measurement and scoring offerings today. Both play off the well-known concept of a 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's Abbey Klaassen was briefed on both of the new tools and writes about the Razorfish solution:

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.

And the Ogilvy 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.

"We're basically paying attention to all the positive word-of-mouth for a brand and through a very simple Net Promoter-esque formula can report out [whether we] did increase preference for the brand" OgilvyPR's digital-influence group managing director John Bell told Klaassen.