The Top 5 Social Media ROI Predictions for 2012

Posted in Big Data, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Social Media ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on December 23rd, 2011

 

For the past few years, marketers have been working to define the metrics and methods to measure social media ROI but have they gotten any closer to establishing metrics that actually matter? Marketers now know that counting fans, followers, and influence is not the best way to measure their campaign investments in social media. Yet we find that these metrics are often the top benchmarks for performance. So is it true that in 2012, marketers still consider calculating return on investment to be the biggest challenge of using social media?

Research from Chief Marketer found that two in five marketers have little confidence in the effectiveness of their ability to measure social media campaigns.

So what is preventing marketers from establishing industry standards for measuring the effectiveness of social media and what will enable them to make 2012 the year of social media ROI? Here are the top 5 ways we think it can happen:

1. Apply business-level analysis to social media measurement and set benchmarks for pre/post comparisons to determine its true impact.
2. Segment social media metrics into 3 distinct buckets:
   - Revenue/Business Development (sales, average order value, lead gen, etc.)
   - Cost Savings (recruitment savings, online media mentions vs. PR agency fees, online customer support vs. call center fees, etc.)
   - Qualitative Metrics (such as share of voice, brand awareness, influence and so on)
3. Choose the right technology, tools, metrics and collaboration to strengthen social media programs – it goes without saying that measurement and monitoring social media can be time consuming and wasteful without the right tools that can sift through this enormous set of data – both qualitatively and quantitatively.
4. Invest in dedicated resources – the big question for companies that have not yet fully created dedicated social media business units is deciding who in the company is supposed to be handling it, what are the new skill sets that are required, and how will they interface with other groups.
5. Focus marketing efforts on meaningful social engagement interactions instead of cheap impression strategies – move beyond campaigns that capture “likes” and “followers” into more meaningful interactions that support and build your community such as answering product questions and troubleshooting customer product issues which result in strong brand loyalty.

In the end, the competitive advantage goes to companies who quickly figure out how to tackle these issues in 2012 and the time is NOW to begin.  We’re hopeful companies and brands not only achieve but surpass these predictions in social business and we look forward to working towards that same end in the New Year!

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The Influence Effect – It’s Real!

Posted in Content Marketing, Inbox Influencer, Influence, Social Media Marketing by Chris Selland on December 20th, 2011

 

Mashable today published a very useful graphic illustrating how ‘Influence’ affects consumer decisions in various markets and for different products. Clearly the ‘Influence Effect’ is real!

This effect is not, however, restricted solely to consumer products and services. Business-to-Business (B2B) customers are becoming just as social – their rates of adoption may not be quite as rapid as consumers, but the impact is just as real.

Enjoy the graphic below – and don’t forget that you can discover some of your most influential customers, influencers and competitors are with our free Inbox Influencer service. Sign up today!

Tags: Influence
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IBM & SAP Believe in Social Analytics – and So Do We!

Posted in Big Data, Social Intelligence, Social Media Analytics, Social Media ROI, Top Stories by Chris Selland on December 12th, 2011

 

A number of news items today indicating the emergence of Social Analytics and validating the potential within mainstream, enterprise organizations:

• IBM’s blog post placing Social Analytics at the top of their Predictions for 2012 list:

As 2011 comes to a close, it’s time to look ahead to what’s next in social business for 2012. IBM’s Alistair Rennie, GM of Social Business, has three predictions for what we can expect to see in social in 2012:

1. Social Analytics
“In today’s highly connected global business environment, the way people communicate, find and share information and work together has changed dramatically. In 2012, social analytics tools will become the must have to gain insight and make better, faster business decisions and improve customer satisfaction. Whether it’s analytics of an internal social network, or gaining customer insight through analysis of external social networks, organizations will increasingly rely on social technologies to listen, examine, and connect to act.”

• SAP’s announcement that they will partner with NetBase for Social Analytics, as I blogged at the Enterprise Irregulars site.

It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway!) that we are major believers in the power and potential of Social Analytics, and believe that 2012 will be a breakout year as mainstream organizations recognize the need to integrate both internal (traditional BI) with external social data. We are gratified and excited to see validation from two of the most significant enterprise technology providers on those points as well.

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Twitter Goes for Reach – The Link Between ‘Social’ and ‘CRM’?

Posted in Social CRM, Twitter Marketing, Twitter ROI by Chris Selland on December 9th, 2011

 

This recent post from Useful Social Media entitled ‘Is Twitter the call centre of the future?’ illustrates a trend we’ve seen a great deal of recently while working with various Terametric clients, prospects and speaking at events.

Specifically, that the power of Twitter as a communications vehicle isn’t necessarily limited to the Marketing department, and for many organizations some of the most powerful applications can be found within Customer Service. Responding to customers who have issues, complaints and other forms of feedback is the reason your organization should be ‘listening’ – and while Marketing should be privy to those discussions, it’s Customer Service who often most logically would respond.

More importantly, as companies seek to build a link between their ‘Social’ (new) and ‘CRM’ (existing) initiatives, these service-related efforts play a very key role. By focusing on simplicity and ubiquity, Twitter is positioning itself well to be the ‘least-common-denominator’ Social Network. With parents even securing Twitter handles for their newborn children (yes really!) it’s not difficult to foresee a future where a Twitter handle is as common as a mobile phone – i.e. everybody has one.

Twitter showed us its plans to become the social network for global communication. The company has decided to focus on scaling back its look and feature set, and wants to hone in on simplicity.

This is a huge turning point for Twitter, as it is now clear that the service is a fierce competitor to Facebook. Facebook is adding more features that could complicate things for the users it already has, while Twitter is focusing on making it simpler to use for “everyone”.

If that is the future that emerges, then Twitter becomes a natural vehicle for not just marketing to customers, but for responding to and servicing them as well – and managing the entirety of the customer lifecycle. In other words, it becomes a key enabling technology for communication between enterprises and their customers – and a focal point for the still-vaguely-defined promise of ‘Social CRM’.

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Closed Loop Marketing: Leveraging Twitter Analytics in Real Time

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Twitter ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on December 5th, 2011

 

In my last post about the opportunities that big data presents for marketers, I illustrated how external data – when collected and analyzed – can provide awareness, intent and conversions and when combined with customer relationship management systems, provides opportunity for customer support and engagement.

Connecting the dots between external and internal data presents a new opportunity for marketing to directly impact sales and customer support.

It’s also about closing the loop – or closed loop marketing. A closed loop marketing system allows marketers to determine which activities in one or more channels are the most efficient sources of new customers.

With closed loop marketing marketers can track leads from their initial contact through a first conversion all the way to becoming a customer. This allows you to see which channel activities are the most efficient and gives you actionable insight to make smart marketing investments.

How Does Closed Loop Marketing Work?

It begins with collecting and measuring activities in Twitter and other marketing and sales channels such as your website, blog, community and CRM system. Each activity is weighted according to its ability to drive conversion.

1. Measurement & Optimization

• Comparing oubound (what you do in Twitter) vs. inbound (what happens as a result) metrics
• Competitive benchmarking (compare your results to your top competitors)
• Daily averages over 14 days (collect data on a daily basis and reset after 14 days)
• Optimized over time (look for patterns over time and adjust the weights or relevance of individual metric values)

Once you’ve analyzed the data, its about choosing the most under performing metrics relative to your competitors and incorporating them into your outbound activities.

2. Efficient & Effective Outbound Activities

• Who to follow (identify those active members of your Twitterverse to follow)
• When to tweet (identify when the most active times are to tweet relative to trending topics of conversation)
• What to tweet about (identify highly influential and trending topics of conversation to maximize the activity levels of your tweets)

Tracking that outbound activity with the results – or inbound activity – is critical to knowing whether the predictive capability of your initial analysis is accurate.

3. ROI Analysis

• Soft conversions (conversions that generate engagement vs. actual revenue)
• Customer support (actual customer interactions on Twitter)
• Sales cycle & conversions (conversions that generate revenue or shorten the sales cycle)

Due to the real time nature of Twitter, this process is ongoing and data should be collected on a daily basis but analyzed on a weekly basis. What you do this week on Twitter might be different the next. When this is done in real time, the results yield highly targeted and efficient use of Twitter.

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Twitter ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments