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The Bottom Line

Posted in Focus Roundtable Discussions, Focus.com, Social CRM, Social Media Metrics, Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis by Chris Selland on January 16th, 2012

Our friend Heidi Tobias at Constant Contact shared some interesting statistics earlier today:

Evangelists in social media spend 13% more and refer business worth 45% what they spend. flpbd.it/tLkm Make the investment. #smb

— htoby (@htoby) January 16, 2012

Not long afterward, we came across this terrific blog post and video from Brian Solis:

Yet despite the increasingly obvious positive (and negative) impacts that ‘Social’ is having on our businesses, we continue to hear many claiming that the impact of Social ‘can’t be measured’.

Wrong.

It may not be easy, but it’s increasingly necessary. There simply isn’t an option to ignore it anymore.

Quoting Brian:

What the social media gurus aren’t telling you is that the landscape for business isn’t changing because of social media, it’s changing because consumer expectations are evolving.

Your customers are empowered through technology where social media becomes only part of the disruption.

Your job in 2012 is to not embrace new technology with arms wide open, but instead understand it and learn which disruptive technologies separate you from existing and potential customers.

Exactly right.

Our Focus Social CMO Roundtable on Wednesday will be specifically focused on the metrics being used by leading CMO’s to measure – and manage – their Social initiatives in light of the tremendous changes we are all facing. There’s already an online discussion going around this topic – which will be continued live.

I hope you can join us – and hope that you are able to respond to the ’seminal changes’ we are all facing in 2012 in a positive, constructive, and measured manner.

Tags: Brian Solis, measurement, ROI, Social
Posted in Focus Roundtable Discussions, Focus.com, Social CRM, Social Media Metrics, Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis | View Comments

Will Social Stay ‘Hot’ in 2012? Does It Matter?

Posted in Social CRM, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis by Chris Selland on January 5th, 2012

As we enter the New Year, it’s clear that Marketers across both B2C and B2B industries are continuing to invest heavily in Social – as a recent study by IBM indicates.

Yet there are still voices that continue to label Social as a ‘fad’ that will fade in importance in 2012 and beyond. For instance, Vivek Wadhwa predicted that Social will ‘lose its sizzle’ in this past week’s Washington Post.

It’s already happening in fact, as growth of social media usage has begun to slow for upstarts such as FourSquare and stalwarts such as Facebook alike. Silicon Valley has been obsessed with social media and investors have funded hundreds of “me too” start-ups to the tune of billions of dollars. There are social networks for pet owners, all manner of marginal Twitter apps, a ridiculous number of mobile photo-sharing apps, hundreds of apps targeting social media analytics and on and on and on.

Yet, is ‘losing sizzle’ such a bad thing? Or is it a signal that Social is becoming pervasive and mainstream?

There are still plenty of advocates for the value of Social. Forrester analyst William Band recently spoke for the demonstrated value of Social in Forrester’s The Top Thirteen Customer Management Trends for 2012:

More social CRM use cases spotlighting demonstrable business value will emerge. Forrester’s annual Groundswell Awards showcases hundreds examples of how organizations use Social Computing — for example, in market research, customer self-service, and product development.

Salesforce.com claims that 2011 was the year that Social already went mainstream.

Social Goes Mainstream: A Look Back at 2011

Salesforce.com VP of Strategy John Taschek suggested in his recent blog post that ‘The Social Revolution Has Just Begun’ (and agreed with my comments that while pundits and others may overstate change in the short-term, we are understating it in the longer-term).

I could go on and on, presenting various opinions on how ‘hot’ or not Social is and will be. While investors will care (in large part to justify the stratospheric valuations many Social companies are receiving), it’s not clear at all why companies seeking to leverage Social should.

Then what does matter? Gary Vaynerchuk (i.e. @garyvee) does his usual very direct job of getting to the heart of what does matter, in this recent Inc. Magazine piece.

Social-media marketing’s monetization will come, too, he says. “People don’t want to embrace culture shifts because it’s not going to happen in the next 20 minutes,” he says.

“When I hear people debate the ROI of social media? It makes me remember why so many business fail,” Vaynerchuk says. “Most businesses are not playing the marathon. They’re playing the sprint. They’re not worried about lifetime value and retention. They’re worried about short-term goals.”

So what should you be doing? Think long term, and consider how you can earn life-long customers. Says Vaynerchuk, “Social-media marketing is like going Beyonce on your customers. You’ve got to put a f—ing ring on it.”

In other words, for those of you trying to use it, don’t do Social because it’s ‘hot’. Do it because it’s about your customers and the value of their long-term relationship with you. In the words of Nick Cifuentes of ClickZ:

The long-term effect here is what makes social media more valuable than any other form of marketing. It connects with every part of your organization’s business.

As ‘Social’ continues to become mainstream and pervasive, we will likely no longer call it out as a special ‘hot’ category any more. Even the skeptical Wadwha admits to this:

Just as location-based applications became a “feature” rather than the “big thing,” social media will live on and become an integral part of what we do.

Exactly.

Tags: Chris Selland, marketing investment, marketing performance, Social Media, social media analysis, Social Media Analytics, Social Media ROI
Posted in Social CRM, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis | View Comments

Social Influence Gains Credence in 2012

Posted in Influence, Social Influence Marketing, Social Media ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on January 3rd, 2012

In recognition of the increasing role online social influence plays in brand affinity and purchasing decisions, we think 2012 will be about engaging with social media and social influencers to further marketing and business goals. It won’t hurt that marketers are looking to gain a deeper understanding of social media marketing and get serious about their overall Social Media Marketing strategy this year either.

Influencers Drive the Interaction

Consumers are communicating more than ever online and making more of their choices based on the opinions of others – as experts, as friends, and as complete strangers. In the same vane for BtoB, industry experts are popping up everywhere outside of the traditional institutions like Gartner or Forrester.

The bottom line? It’s about peers influencing peers and brands engaging with consumers and industry experts on the their terms – wherever and whenever the they choose. This is where Social Media Marketing segments into another dimension – Social Influence marketing.

The Need for ROI

There is still no way around it – without the ability to not only find influencers but measure their impact on the bottom line is critical to the success of any Social Media Marketing campaign.

“Qualified Leads (35%) is always going to be the CFO’s measure of social media results. The marketing buzzwords of “activity,” “brand,” and “sentiment” are not going to hold water in 2012 for most businesses.”

Automating the Search for Peer Influencers

So with social media marketing budgets that are small and with pressures of demonstrating ROI, how can marketers leverage technology that will enable them to transcend from a world where brand marketing and direct response were all that mattered to leveraging IM? Here at Terametric we are developing sophisticated technologies to find peer influencers on a continuous basis.

We offer a free product that does just that (see: Inbox Influencer). Take the first step and try it today!

Posted in Influence, Social Influence Marketing, Social Media ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments

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:

Apply business-level analysis to social media measurement and set benchmarks for pre/post comparisons to determine its true impact.
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)
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.
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.
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!

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

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’.

Posted in Social CRM, Twitter Marketing, Twitter ROI | View Comments

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

How The Clymb Uses Top of the Funnel Marketing Metrics to Drive Twitter ROI

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Twitter ROI by Wendy Troupe on November 22nd, 2011

The Clymb is a private flash sale site for Outdoor Gear and Apparel. Kevin Palmer is responsible for their online marketing. At the Clymb, Kevin measures membership growth, customer service questions, and the reach of their Twitter posts which directly impacts their outbound activities.

Kevin follows a methodology that assembles metrics in real time to captures “top of the funnel” Twitter activity to track their marketing activities through to where sales are created.

It’s easy to understand how valuable your existing customers are, and easy to think about how you want to spend time and money in promoting and building your brand in Twitter.

Like any ordinary marketing funnel – many prospects enter the funnel at the top but only a few continue down to the bottom. Those who make it to the bottom are your high value customers. In simplistic terms, all you have to do is attract many prospects in at the top – customers and therefore profits should come out the bottom.

However, there are two important things to note.

Many online businesses spend a lot of time and resources attracting people to follow them in Twitter, but not enough making sure that these people are converted into sales.
Businesses often neglect marketing to and supporting existing customers through Twitter. Marketing efforts should also be focused on moving people down the marketing funnel as well as into it at the top.

Twitter can become a channel that drives trust and engagement. Segmenting your measurement in real time into these four buckets can help you execute successful marketing campaigns using Twitter.

How The Clymb Measures & Monitors Twitter

Set benchmarks against their competitor activity and found that use of lists, follower influence, hashtags, authenticity, and which topics of conversation are trending which drove their targeted outbound Twitter activities.
Build their follower lists which include industry enthusiasts, brands they partner with, customers, and athletes.
Share content that people care about and try to leverage hashtags to track conversations.
Curate posts from their friends and partners at relevant peak activity time certain times.

How They Calculate the ROI and Close the Loop

Track actual membership referrals.
Measure customer engagement & support.
Calculate competitive growth and refine outbound activities.

This has been scaled with a limited staff because they are leveraging big data to become more efficient and effective.

What Are the Results of Their Closed Loop Measurements in Action?

Awareness: Their website has seen an over 300% growth in Twitter followers since the start of the year.
Intent: Twitter has a 3:1 share rate when it comes to members sharing product listings.
Conversions: Twitter has a 30% higher member invite rate than Facebook, their users are more likely to invite new members.
Customer Engagement: 78% of all customer service inquiries placed on Twitter that we have answered have led to a positive tweet about the brand.

“Concentrated content matters. It isn’t how much we post, but what and when.”
- Kevin Palmer, Senior Director of Online Marketing

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Twitter ROI | View Comments

Leveraging Big Data: THE Major Theme at Defrag

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on November 15th, 2011

Upon returning from the 5th annual Defrag conference in Denver, it became evident very quickly that the major theme at the conference was “big data”. Although the notion of big data has been around for some time in other industries, social media has created a whole new and exponentially larger deluge of data for businesses to leverage within the last couple of years.

To be exact:

IBM just completed a study and found that more than 90% of the data in the world today was created in the last two years.
Facebook allows users to share 30 billion pieces of content each month.
Twitter’s active user base generates 250 million tweets per day.
Combined, these sites create 17 terabytes of data every day.
In total, every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data.

What are the dimensions and challenges of big data? Roger Ehrenberg broke it down really well. Big data is:

Complex
Large
Unstructured
Real Time

Likewise, Jive’s David Gutelius described big data similarly using– the Four V’s analogy:

Velocity
Variety
Volume
Volatility

But let’s be clear – big data is in its infancy and growing at an exponentially high rate.

Analytics is More than Counting

This new data deluge promises to provide us the opportunity to turn information overload into an asset for better decision making by applying analytics. Even within analytics, it is more than just counting total volumes of activity – it is about mining intelligence from disparate data sources – looking for the patterns and relationships in the data itself.

Think of big data as the words of a story – by themselves they have limited meaning. When you add grammar and structure, you begin to link together these words and can develop many different meaning and insights from the collection of words. The science of big data is similar – data stored in information systems are the words and the emerging data analytics is the grammar which allows analysts and decision makers to derive meaning from data.

There are some challenges in doing it the old way in collecting these huge volumes of data and analyzing it. It can be inefficient and cost prohibitive and difficult to scale. People and resources are being wasted. It is estimated that employees spend up to two hours a day looking for the right information, such as analyzing tweet streams.

Collecting smaller subsets of data and analyzing it for patterns over time will provide better predictive capability that just storing and counting total volumes.

Your Customers Are Engaging in Real Time

And businesses are finding that they have to move quickly. Their customers are multiplying like rabbits online.

Did you know that socially engaged consumers spend more on brands than those people who don’t interact? That’s according to a new Bain & Company report, which studied social media and its role in marketing.

Apparently, the study found that people who talk to brands on networks like Twitter and Facebook spend 20 to 40 percent more money on their products and services compared to those who don’t. They also show a ‘deeper emotional commitment’ to companies who use social media – 33 per cent higher than the common measure for customer loyalty.

Due to the speed and access of information at their fingertips, consumers expect the same quick response if they talk to brands online. For example, if someone ‘tweets’ a brand, they expect an instant reply. If they don’t get this ‘real-time customer service’, they’ll feel ignored and your reputation could be at stake.

Looking at these fascinating facts and figures, it’s clear. Engagement adds real value these days, a crucial aspect of movement marketing. But how does engagement lead to more sales?

Big Data is About Connecting the Dots

With this extremely large and unstructured data set that consists of qualitative, quantitative and the social graph, there is a smaller very relevant subset of data that represent opportunities for sales and marketing to capitalize on. When this data set is combined and correlated with an organization’s internal data set, it becomes a lead-gen pipeline for and a more efficient and effective method of attracting, engaging and supporting customers – in real time.

External data when collected and analyzed can provide awareness, intent and conversions and when combined with customer relationship management systems, provide 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.

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments

The R and the I – What’s Engagement Worth?

Posted in Focus.com, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Social Media ROI, Twitter Marketing, Twitter ROI by Chris Selland on November 14th, 2011

One of the biggest challenges in calculating Return on Investment (ROI) from any type of marketing initiative – social or other – is in quantifying the actual economic value produced by it. After all, at least as far as your CFO is concerned, that is the ‘R’ in ‘ROI – and it needs to be understood in at least a general sense if you want his/her cooperation to invest in it.

As a marketer, you almost always know your costs – how much you’re spending on those tools, consultants, services and of course the value of your own and your team’s time that is being applied to the various campaigns and ongoing initiatives you’re running. Those are the invoices and salaries you are always asking said CFO to pay – that’s the ‘I’.

There’s no denying the fact that calculating the ‘R’ has always been challenging. In the famous words of legendary merchandiser John Wanamaker (a quote often mis-attributed to David Ogilvy)…

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Customers almost never purchase directly from a marketing campaign, so how can one attribute the specific ‘R’ to a specific ‘I’ with any real precision?

However, that difficulty does not absolve marketers from making an effort. Especially since new marketing channels, technologies and platforms are making all of this much easier. As I chimed in on a Focus Q&A over the weekend

“Metrics such as clickthroughs, conversions, ReTweets, Likes, etc… are more easily measured on social media than similar metrics for more traditional media, plus measurement and analytics platforms have improved significantly (and continue to).”

In other words, it may be difficult to know your specific ROI but your ability to model and measure approximate if not 100% precise answers is getting better all the time. A recent lawsuit, for instance, values Twitter followers at $2.50 apiece – while this may not be your organization’s exact number (it almost certainly isn’t) it at least provides some context so that you can use to analyze your Twitter activity and determine whether the I’s you’re making justify the R you’re getting in the form of new engaged followers.

The important distinction is that ‘engagement’, ‘loyalty’, ‘influence’, ‘reach’ and similar commonly cited ‘metrics’ are qualities that our marketing activities are driving but they can only be measured by building models that are built on more specific and quantifiable figures such as:

“How many new followers did we get from that last campaign?”

“How many recipients clicked through on that link we Tweeted out and downloaded our White Paper?”

These numbers can be measured and counted – as can the investment required to produce them.

The point is that measurement is challenging but analytics are rapidly improving, and there are more and more third-party data points that one can use to at least approximate their ROI calculations. ROI is essentially a modeling exercise with the end goal of advising on relative decisions between the trade-offs we as marketers must make every day – where do we invest, how much, and why?

We would welcome the opportunity to discuss your experiences and, of course, help you build those analytics and models. It’s what we do and we’d love to hear from you.