The folks at Marketing Profs recently published a report called “Social Media ROI Success Stories, How 11 companies—like OfficeMax, Nissan, BMC and Microsoft—are listening, engaging and measuring” that provides insight into the feelings in the marketplace about the products that provide social media measurement and monitoring. Several companies are included in the case study which provides a sense of what companies are doing to measure and quantify the impact of their social media initiatives, what they are doing to translate their activities into bottom-line results, and how they are monitoring conversations on an ongoing basis to improve customer service, public relations and brand-reputation management. 

I’d like to summarize the lessons learned from established brands that are investing in social media. 

1. Set up benchmarks based on metrics that are aligned with your bottom line results before you launch a large-scale social media campaign.
2. Gather feedback at every interaction you have with your online community to gain further insight into buying activity.
3. Develop a clear strategy that sets forth specific deliverables and success metrics.
4. Be ready to adjust your campaign based on results; there are no clear rules of engagement and you must be prepared to respond quickly if needed.
5. Integrate your social media presence and make it easy for your community to share with others; this includes using tools like Facebook Connect that allows Facebook users to login to your site and share content.
6. Integrate other sales and customer data to gain greater awareness and insights.
7. Don’t abandon traditional methods of marketing, PR and sales. Social media should be well integrated to further their effectiveness and reinforce your message. This is also true with your metrics.
8. Pay attention to sentiment and join in on conversations that are positive to further promote and negative to engage and change.
9. Look for insights into every aspect of your business and make the intelligence actionable—whether internalizing product feedback or building new relationships.
10. Enlist the support of at least one dedicated resource to this endeavor.
11. And last, and most importantly, use several social media tools because there’s no comprehensive tool that measures everything you’ll need.

Terametric provides a comprehensive approach that integrates all traditional measurement with social media analytics and monitors and filters conversations that are important to you. Most importantly, it provides you with a complete set of metrics that can be used to benchmark your social media campaigns to demonstrate ROI. Best of all, when you figure your Terametric score, you are presented with enough insight to know where the conversations are happening, who you should engage with, and what the key topics are that you’ll need to facilitate and design a campaign to influence. 

 

Wendy Troupe is founder and CEO for Terametric, a social media and web 2.0 analytics product built by Terametric, a data-driven solutions and advisory services business specializing in helping organizations build, support and leverage their most important asset — their social capital. We believe passionately in the power of data to drive business decisions and to enable new customer propositions and business tools. We combine data from the social web and customers to help our clients qualify their competitive presence in the social media space and design strategies that align with targeted business objectives to effectively measure their ROI. 

Tags: Social Media ROI

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 12:00 AM by Wendy Troupe and is filed under Wendy Troupe's Perspectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.