Marketing Tactegy

Social Media ROI Interview Series

Steven Groves of the Social Media Bible and I are embarking on a series of interviews on the topic of the ROI of Social Media.  The first in this series was with Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6.  We will be doing many more and it should be a very interesting series of metrics and measurements to drive increased ROI in Social Media.

Check them out here: http://socialmediabible.ning.com/profiles/blogs/roi-of-social-media-series.

Let me know what you think.

Social Media Metrics & PR Camp Atlanta

inally getting a chance to put down my thoughts from PR Camp Atlanta.  It was billed as the un-conference and that’s what made it very interesting.

There were four teams, each working through a number of similar questions and that led to some good discussion and learning.  The key session topics were:

1. Get clients and bosses to extend their interest in new media
2. Help senior professionals tap the social media experience of junior colleagues
3. With PR and marketing blurring, determine the best ways to measure success

The biggest insight for me was the concern for marketing ROI and metrics.  In social media, there are quite a few metrics.  Certainly Facebook isn’t delivering everything that’s needed, but there are some early signs of good metrics.

Social Media Metrics

Overall there is definitely some (to put it kindly) confusion as to the use and purpose of metrics.  Applied generally to marketing and to social media specifically metrics have two purposes:

• Measuring and optimizing the use of the site and actions in the community.  For example, Twitter now has a strong following of third party metrics and analytics software providers to help Twitter users grow their follower base and to follow others.  These include TweetBeep.com, TweetDeck.com, Tweepular.com and many others.
• Measuring and optimizing the use of the site to drive revenue, profit, brand and share (These I define as the true measures of ROI).  There are a number of tools that provide the kinds of outputs that can be analyzed to determine the net effect of social sites on critical ROI measures.  In order to make the connection with revenue or other ROI measures.  For example, how many click-throughs were received from Facebook or MySpace?  As for sentimentality and other important metrics Scoutlabs and Radian6 offer some interesting capabilities that can be used to analyze social media at a deeper level.

Once you have these numbers and with some intelligence you can then measure and analyze how each of these communities are delivering on the business goal of revenue, profit, brand and share.
If you have any thoughts or questions, please let me know.  You can also follow me on Twitter at @GuyPowell.  Please tag with #ROMI.

Direct and indirect marketing response, social media and Facebook Insights

Last Touch Attribution

I’ve been wrestling with one of the biggest misperceptions I see in marketing metrics and especially how it relates to social media.  The misperception has to do with the directly measurable response as opposed to the indirect value you get when your consumer receives any impression from you.  This is especially the case on the web.  Many web marketers attribute conversions to clicks using click-source URLs.  Unfortunately, just as with multiple touches across multiple media this provides only a partial story.  It totally disregards the value all other touches, both concurrent and prior.  The term Last Touch Attribution defined in previous posts describes how this metric works.

Last Touch Attribution and Social Media

This misperception is going to get worse as more marketers engage in social media tactics, where engagement with the brand takes place online, either on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or elsewhere.  This brand engagement generally leads to positive brand reinforcement, although there can also be negative reinforcement as well.  The issue for marketing metrics professionals is to put a framework together that can start to measure the value of the engagement with the social media site. It’s not just about how many unique visitors come from the social media site.  A more accurate measure of success is the total level of engagement users generate while engaging with the site.  Social media metrics currently include the number of fans, time on site and other behavioral metrics.  But as metrics professionals we need to determine how these metrics can be connected with overall incremental brand engagement and then connect incremental brand engagement with incremental sales.

Facebook Insights

Facebook recently launched a new metrics framework (Facebook Insights) with a new metric called ‘Post Quality’.  The metrics include enhanced demographic and behavioral information and also this new indicator of page engagement.  It is described as:

“Your Post Quality is determined by the percentage of your fans that engage when you post content to your Page. It is calculated on a rolling seven-day basis. The number of stars depends on how your Post Quality compares to similar Pages (for example, Pages that have a similar number of fans),”
(Inside Facebook, Facebook Upgrading “Insights” Metrics Dashboard for Page Managers Tonight, May 5th, 2009).

This is a first step in the right direction, but it will be interesting to see how this correlates (probably with some lag) with brand sales, or unique visits to the brand website.  Over time the question that needs to be answered is whether this metric measures fan engagement with the page and the brand, not just the post.  This metric appears to be a good step in helping marketers improve their posts, drive incremental engagement and then deliver incremental brand engagement and revenue.

If you have any experiences in this area I would love to hear from you.