So you have jumped into the sea of social media. But how do you know if your engagement will be successful? And will it be worth the resources (both time and money) that you are investing?
Increasingly I am concerned about the conversations I am having with brand managers, PR firms and entrepreneurs about ‘how to get a social media strategy in place’.
Firstly I don’t believe that social media is a ’strategy’. Social media allows us new ways of listening, engaging, connecting and learning about what our customers and potential customers are saying about our brand/product/service, our competitors and other issues that are of concern to them.
The art is then about what you as a company do once you have listened to the conversation – what is being said; what does it mean; what impact does that have for your company, products and services; what will you do as a result; what resources will you need; how will you know that your actions will be of benefit to your business? And many more questions besides.
In all the workshops I lead I encourage participants to go back to the beginning – what is your business strategy and what are you trying to achieve? Then how can social media help you as part of an integrated plan achieve those goals.
One of the key questions we then explore is how social media can deliver a return on investment. As with all marketing and communications programmes it’s important to understand what your key performance indicators will be and create metrics relevant to your goals.
It was great to therefore see that the conversation about metrics relating to digital marketing and social media was being discussed at Ireland’s first Measurement Camp earlier this week. You can see the Twitter chatter and back channel from measurement camp here.
I was therefore interested to see Omniture announce a service to measure Facebook apps this week. Omniture is a provider of online business optimisation software and their new service allows their clients to measure the popualrity and success of Facebook applications.
The goal of the Omniture service is to help companies:
- understand Facebook users and their engagement with applications
- access insights into the relationship between Facebook, site traffic and other online channels
- develop more relevant applications.
Check out screen shots of the Omniture Facebook app measurement tools on Flickr.
Omniture have offices in Europe, Asia and the US, so if you are interested in exploring more detailed measurement of Facebook applications, you might want to contact them.
What other resources do you recommend for measuring the return on investment in social media?
June 10th, 2009 at 11:30 am
Interesing post Krishna. As you say “As with all marketing and communications programmes it’s important to understand what your key performance indicators will be and create metrics relevant to your goals.” These should be qualitative as well as quantitative and we should consider all social media (not just Facebook and Twitter) and look at gauging the reach and impact of sites where conversations take place. My advice for social media engagement is to completely understand your social media space before wading in. Start small (less budget, limit damage if it agoes wrong) and don’t be afraid to experiment. As Paul Gillin points out ROI is also Reason Of Inaction.