Hot Potato Topic of the Week:  Social Media ROI

Measurement of social media activity to determine ROI is a hot (and controversial!) topic on the web right now.  You can see some examples of just how controversial it is here, here, here and here.  Hat tip to Chuck Fitzpatric of ImpactWatch blog for those examples and more (and for the sound of dueling banjos that played through my head as I scanned the list of headlines).  

Still, few people will argue that social media doesn’t have clear, distillable value to companies. Social media monitoring, in my opinion, is one of the most easily translatable value-driven elements of corporate social media, especially when viewed as an add-on to existing brand research efforts.

Getting a Clearer Picture of Your Customer

A better understanding of your customer is critical to effective communication with them. Put it in the context of your interpersonal relationships.  How many communications misfires do you have in your personal and professional relationships due to a poor understanding of the other person’s perspective?  

Brand research is an excellent tool for gaining a basic understanding of your customers and prospects from a demographic and psychographic standpoint.  

If you’re using personas in any capacity in developing your marketing communications, social media monitoring can be hugely helpful in creating fully-rounded, three-dimensional personas instead of stereotypes and cardboard-cutouts

By monitoring social media for references to your brand, your products, your industry, and your competitors, you can gain additional insights that can often help flesh out and provide depth and dimension to your understanding of your audience’s attitudes, opinions and vernacular.  

These insights can help your organization speak your customer’s language more like a native, and less like a tacky tourist.  

Particularly for businesses whose customer base is largely made up of passionate enthusiasts in a particular activity or lifestyle group, having greater authenticity in your communications with them is critical to success.

The Plural of Anecdote Isn’t Data, But That Doesn’t Mean We Don’t Like Them!

We’re always anxious to hear stories of ways in which social media monitoring has been applied effectively to improve brand communications.  Got an anecdote you can share?  Drop it in the comments.  Or if you’d like, contact us about doing a case study guest post.  We’d love to have it! 

img "mannequin" courtesy SXC

One of the most compelling and confounding questions in social media is how to determine success or failure? Return on Investment is a persistent topic among social media professionals.

It’s not that there aren’t plenty of things that you can measure. The question is, what should you measure, and what do those numbers mean in terms of business objectives?

At the outset, you may not know what measurements are the most important. Expect your measurement efforts to evolve over time, as you begin to learn by doing which needles your social efforts can move. Also, as activity evolves, the types of things you can measure become increasingly complex and meaningful.

That said, here are five traditional measurements that are probably a good starting point.

1. Pageviews: The most basic of all web-based statistics, pageviews have replaced “hits” (which was a metric that was so unclear as to border on deceptive) as the baseline measurement for any online marketing effort.
2. Visitors: Again, this is a fairly basic measure for nearly any online marketing effort.
3. Downloads or Clickthroughs on Calls-To-Action: If downloadable media (anything from podcasts to PDFs) are part of your social media content strategy, then you absolutely should be measuring the percentage of visitors who are consuming that content. Similarly, if your content includes direct calls-to-action, the success rate of those CTAs should be considered when determining success or failure.
4. Time-on-site or Bounce Rate: A high bounce rate can indicate a number of issues with your content, from poor targeting to issues with length and format. It’s a starting point for improving the relevance of your social media content. Understanding time-on-site changes can be trickier (for example, improved navigation can sometimes shorten TOS as users can more quickly find what they’re looking for) but any sudden sharp changes in time-on-site indicate a question that’s worth pursuing further.
5. Returning visitors or RSS and Email Subscription rates: Knowing how many people overall your social content attract is important, but knowing how many of those people found the content sticky enough to return or better yet, subscribe, is a good basic gauge of the quality and relevance of your content.

As I’ve said, these are very basic measurements. As your efforts progress, measuring things like the ratio of visitors to commentors on a blog, or the number of inbound links, or the number of times a widget has been embedded or shared, may make more sense, and be more meaningful. But it’s rarely a bad idea to start with the basics, especially when entering unfamiliar territory.