MarketingSherpa recently published an executive summary for a new study called 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report. If the executive summary is any indication, I think the report may hold some very interesting findings about the corporate adoption of social media as a increasingly-common customer outreach channel. If you haven’t read the executive summary yet, I strongly encourage it.

While I won’t provide a summary of the summary, I would like to share some thoughts on their findings. They’ve created a very interesting info-graphic below to describe both the recommended approach to social media and the various stages of, what the report calls, Social Marketing Maturity.

MarketingSherpa puts forth the R.O.A.D. Map method as the recommended approach to social media marketing. First, companies should research (listen), then plan according to a clearly defined set of objectives (presumably stemming from an over-arching goal) and then create strategies (action) that align to and help the company reach measurable objectives. Each strategy is deployed as a set of executional tactics (devices).

The graphic further illustrates the stages of Social Marketing Maturity. The first stage, Trial, can be described as a pell-mell adoption of random platforms with little to no organized and overarching aim. The second stage, Transition, occurs when companies begin to tap into those platforms to derive meaning from the stats generated. The third stage, Strategic, is characterized by a methodical and objectives-driven approach to the application and measurement of only the most relevant platforms. In this stage, careful attention to metrics guides the progress of the strategy. The graphic below tracks which which common social media metrics get the most corporate attention by Social Maturity Stage.

Not surprisingly, Direct Metrics such as web traffic, SEO and improved Public Relations have the smallest percentage spread – with the notable exception of the last two metrics, improving Customer Support Quality and Reducing Customer Support Costs. Companies at any phase find direct metrics easy to track. Unfortunately it’s the direct metrics, those easiest to track, that are the hardest to correlate to true ROI.

Indirect Metrics like Increasing Awareness, Brand Reputation and Reducing Customer Acquisition Cost see the largest percentage spreads between companies in the Trial Phase and companies in the Strategic Phase. Surprisingly, even for companies in the Strategic Phase, less than 60% are tracking these metrics. Indirect Metrics, those easiest to tie to demonstrable ROI, are also the hardest to track. In order to develop an accurate picture of these indirect metrics and ROI, a company must be able to understand and quantify the relationship between several indirect and direct metrics.

The Fourth Phase of Social Media Maturity: the ability to quantify the correlation between the performance of several metrics to develop an accurate picture of ROI.

While many of today’s analysis and monitoring platforms provide accurate and detailed pictures of Direct Metrics, none (to our knowledge and belief) can quantify the correlation between those metrics. Until now . . .

Here at SOCIALtality, we’re close to announcing our three, enterprise-level Alpha Testers. These testers are partnering with us to participate in a manual, real-world test of our analysis and scoring methodology — a methodology that quantifies the relationship between the performance of several communications channels. Not only will the methodology provide an understanding of how the performance of a tactic in one channel affects the performance of tactics in another channel, it will also quantify that relationship in a way that finally makes a detailed measurement of Social Media ROI possible.

Stay tuned for our Alpha Three announcement . . .

What do you think of our Fourth Phase of Social Media Maturity?

Tags: Social Media Analytics, Social Media Strategy

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 17th, 2010 at 8:15 AM by MattC and is filed under Strategy and Analysis. 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.