Measuring the ROI of Social Media ~ How Major Brands are Using Measurement & Monitoring Tools

Posted in Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on August 29th, 2009

 

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
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Social Media Analytics ~ Garbage in, garbage out.

Posted in Social Media ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on August 19th, 2009

 

Asi Sharabi’s Private Selections, “No Man’s Blog” recently posted his feelings about what is lacking in the field of social media analytics/monitoring apps. I have spent the last year undergoing a similar exercise but for different reasons. We’ve both come to the same conclusion. He calls it frustrating. I call it market opportunity. In the end, because he has taken the time to air his feelings, it provides validation for the effort of those “nice people” who work at these companies and first hand customer feedback.

I’d like to run down his list to summarize his valid points and talk to how our product, is addressing them. Here we go…

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Asi Sharabi’s Private Selections, “No Man’s Blog” recently posted his feelings about what is lacking in the field of social media analytics/monitoring apps. I have spent the last year undergoing a similar exercise but for different reasons. We’ve both come to the same conclusion. He calls it frustrating. I call it market opportunity. In the end, because he has taken the time to air his feelings, it provides validation for the effort of those “nice people” who work at these companies and first hand customer feedback.

I’d like to run down his list to summarize his valid points and talk to how our product, is addressing them. Here we go…

1. Shortcomings of the Underlying Technology: Asi is right. Keyword technology is the farthest thing from accurate. That’s why we are using Natural Language Processing and other approaches that attempt to derive meaning and context from data. Some vendors are beginning to use computational linguistics based technologies which is better than plain ol’ keywords. We take it a step further and filter out all of the irrelevant conversations based on sophisticated algorithms and intelligence we derive from your existing online presence (web site, blog, social networks, etc.).
2. Unreliable Data. Again, collecting all the data is one thing but sorting through it and manually extracting intelligence from it is extremely time-consuming. Like some existing vendors, we filter out the spam and noise and also look for other metrics to determine relevance. With out tool, you’ll have the peace of mind that we do the dirty work and present you with what you should be addressing, good, bad or indifferent.
3. Sentiment Analysis is Flawed. Asi points out correctly that keyword based sentiment analysis is almost not worth paying any attention to. There are simply too many nuances in our language especially when it comes to emotions! Let’s face it. People interject sarcasm, irony and subtlety. We are addressing these problems with manual linguistic intervention so you don’t have to. We are also taking a different approach to sentiment so that you can glean much more information from it beyond positive, neutral and negative.
4. Region Specific Data: This is one of the most important areas for global brands and it also involves multiple languages. We pull information about geography beyond the domain based on data from website analytics, traffic analysis, etc. using foreign language modules.
5. Influence Analysis is Flawed. There has been a lot of discourse on this subject and the jury is still out for some. We believe that influence can be measured if it comes from multiple sources leaving room for error. I can’t elaborate on the depth of our approach for competitive reasons. I’ll just have the technology’s accuracy speak for itself.
6. Unreliable Data + Partial Data = Unreliable Stats and Visualization. Yup. Garbage in, garbage out. Some of these tools are pretty “flashy” (literally) when it comes to data visualization but if the underlying data is flawed, what’s it worth? We take a straightforward and simplistic approach so you can easily understand our visual representations but we put most of the effort in the back end for accuracy.
7. Time Consuming. Our goal is to do provide the analytics and analysis for you. Moreover, we offer it to you in language you can understand. If you want to drill down into the underlying data and free form search, you can, too.
8. Price. With the availability of open source, the price of developing technology has dropped and the speed to market has gone up. Offering a SaaS (software as a service) product, is the way to go so that you can offer lower pricing. Our pricing will reflect the usage needs and therefore be more accessible to those with smaller organizations and offer high customized functionality for power users at a higher cost. We offer a fair, affordable and cost effective solution.

I have to say that I agree with everything that Asi has to say, except for one thing. Google has made little attempt at semantic search. It’s very hard to do and Google’s purpose is to provide relevant site results and works on constantly improving algorithms due to the large volume of new content that proliferates in the web. I’m sure it’s on their radar screen but we’ll just have to wait and see. We’re not waiting…neither should you!

Thanks again to Asi for speaking his mind…

Tags: Social Media Measurement
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Taking Social Media Seriously

Posted in Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on August 8th, 2009

 

Studies have shown the trend in the economic downturn has been less spending on traditional media and increase in budgets for social media. MarketingSherpa shows that a lack of knowledge hampers social media marketing with 46% of firms who had not adopted social media marketing citing a lack on internal understanding as their main hindrance. A total of 48% of the firms interviewed predicted that their spending on social media would increase in 2009, with just 20% predicting a decrease.

As social media rapidly matures, it is not just the cost that is influencing the shift. Both the access to analytical data mining and identifiable metrics that help the increasing focus on determining the return on investment (increased conversion rates, higher customer service levels, more targeted prospecting, etc.).

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Studies have shown the trend in the economic downturn has been less spending on traditional media and increase in budgets for social media. MarketingSherpa shows that a lack of knowledge hampers social media marketing with 46% of firms who had not adopted social media marketing citing a lack on internal understanding as their main hindrance. A total of 48% of the firms interviewed predicted that their spending on social media would increase in 2009, with just 20% predicting a decrease.

As social media rapidly matures, it is not just the cost that is influencing the shift. Both the access to analytical data mining and identifiable metrics that help the increasing focus on determining the return on investment (increased conversion rates, higher customer service levels, more targeted prospecting, etc.).

Recently, a new report was published by Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint that ranked the top 100 brands by social media engagement. Based on their premise, companies that are “both deeply and widely engaged in social media surpass their peers in terms of both revenue and profit performance by a significant difference”.

But measuring this is where it gets murky and it is why social media is still has not been taken seriously by marketers and executives. The case has to be backed up by data and with all the analytics that exist, it is still a manual and complicated activity to map analytical data into ROI calculations.

With the growing number of tools to measure, monitor and analyze social media conversations, companies can get a good sense of what is being said, where the conversations are proliferating and who’s influencing and driving the conversations. It is a good place to start before developing a digital strategy so that you have an idea of who you need to reach out to, what to say, and where to say it.

Ultimately, the underlying secret to success using social media, like the companies that use social media well (Dell, Comcast, Zappos), they have all become comfortable with letting individuals from within their company become the faces and evangelists for their brand and offering a real human connection to their online communities. They’re focus is to build their social capital which in turn provides a return in investment on many levels including markeing, brand awareness, loyalty, and most importantly sales.

If you’re interested in how we map the analytics to the ROI with our product, SOCIALtality, contact us directly.

For more thoughts on the Altimeter/WetPaint report, you can find commentary from ZDNet’s Larry Dignan and Mark Schaefer, who delve more into the underlying methodologies and data behind this report’s findings.

Tags: Social Media Case Studies, Social Media Measurement, Social Media ROI
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