How do you measure or put a price on social media love?
Are the things your people are doing on Facebook actually delivering and how can you find out? Paul Cotton has some advice from his experience in the digital world.
The phrase “social media return on investment” has been bandied about a lot lately. Notoriously slippery to get a hold of, it seems to be causing a reasonable amount of concern in business circles. The people running your show, mag, or radio program’s social channels are doing all this Facebook stuff, and it’s on the internet so surely it’s just as measurable as ad clicks but somehow that just doesn’t seem to be the case.
Having worked in the wide world of digital with everyone from entertainment to financial clients, and specialising in social media for a good portion of that, perhaps I can provide a rough idea of what’s going on and some thoughts on how to approach it.
First up, tracking social media ROI is an inherently flaky process. You don’t own the services you’re using and they only give you a portion of the data that relates to you so tracking an end to end user journey is nigh on impossible. That’s just the technical side of it. When you start talking sentiment tracking, things get even weirder. How do you put a price on love?
I thought this was a very apt description of how fluffy some of the measures often are:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gjsT-z16vR0
In times when marketing dollars are all too scarce, marketers are under more pressure than ever to deliver a measurable result back to their management board.
It seems kind of wrong to take a clients budget without structuring the activity in a way where delivering a measurable result is also an outcome,
This seems to only tell a small part of the story – there are much better ways to measure social ROI than simply relying on “correlation” – have a look at the work We Are Social have done for Bulmers (http://wearesocial.net/blog/20.....ebook-fan/). There are tools like SumAll (www.sumall.com) that integrate social tracking into commonly used e-commerce platforms. Even efficient use of Google Analytics can give you better insights into the impact that social is having on the bottom line (see a Quora post on this here – http://www.quora.com/Social-Me.....-available). Integration of social sign-on solutions like JanRain and Gigya also give you lots of great data and insights – and these are only a few of the many options and techniques that are being experimented with. If you’re relying on “correlation” as your primary tracking methodology for measuring social ROI, you just aren’t trying hard enough.