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Are You a Deadly Sinner?

Posted in Social Intelligence, Social Media Metrics, Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis by Kim Cole on January 29th, 2011

I’m talking about the deadly sin of Pride of course. Maybe we should remove Pride from the Deadly Sin list when it comes to social media marketing because you can’t be successful without looking in the mirror every now and then.

In fact, a study recently released by the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research took an in-depth look at the use of social medial in fast-growing corporations. One of the interesting questions they posed was whether or not the participants monitor their company name or brand in social media. The number is up from last year to 70%.

But is just monitoring your company name and brand enough? Probably not. To really understand your reach and influence in social media you should be monitoring a host of metrics. There is a plethora of metrics that measure your performance on Social Media channels and they fall into three general categories: inbound, outbound, and social Intelligence. (Click the links for examples.)

· An Outbound metric measures the marketing activities that you generate or send out within the various social media channels. This constitutes your investment or costs.

· An Inbound metric captures responses resulting from your outbound social media activities and measures your brand/company’s impact in social media or in other words, what is said about your company. This is your return.

· Social Intelligence is a metric that meshes together sentiment, engagement, retention, loyalty, reach and influence to give you an idea what the community is feeling about your brand or company.

If you’re effectively measuring these three areas, you should have a good idea if your social media marketing efforts are helping you reach your company goals. There are many monitoring tools that can help you optimize your efforts as well.

What are your favorite things to monitor about your company or brand? Please share them with us!

Tags: Engagement, inbound metrics, marketing channel, marketing investment, metrics, outbound metrics, Social Intelligence, Social Media Strategy
Posted in Social Intelligence, Social Media Metrics, Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis | View Comments

2 Easy ways NOT to Maximize your Twitter Marketing ROI

Posted in Social Media ROI by Taariq Lewis on November 14th, 2010

This post is Terametric’s Twitter ROI Series leading up to the December 9, 2010 Webinar: How-To measure and improve your Twitter Marketing ROI with Jim Sterne and Kyle Lacy.

Twitter, is quickly evolving into a critical marketing channel to engage customers beyond the one-way broadcast of traditional media. Twitter marketers, however, still measure their success with traditional measures. They conduct marketing activities in the medium and then they measure the success of marketing activity by the number of completed goals such as increase in revenue, customer satisfaction, brand visibility, and brand awareness.

Regardless of how marketers currently measure their Twitter Marketing activity, success or failure, there are a few simple, yet critical uses of the Twitter channel that will always reduce and minimize Twitter Marketing ROI. Below are the top ways that one can fail to maximize ROI impact on Twitter, without even trying.

1. Don’t Complete Your Human Presence on Twitter.
A simple way to be outcompeted and outmaneuvered on Twitter is to not make the required investment in delivering a fully human and completed Twitter profile. Here are the areas where you can, guaranteed, reduce your Twitter marketing ROI impact.
• Don’t create a complete a full Twitter BIO
• Don’t create a professional and personable profile Image that humanizes your account
• Maximize use of logos and brands instead of humans
• Don’t include your accurate geography location in your profile

2. Don’t tweet consistently and relevantly on your Twitter Channel
Industry authority or influence can be easily measured in two qualitative measures. Either you are tweeting about the industry or the industry is tweeting about you. If you’re not #1 in your industry and you’re not tweeting about the industry, then chances are that your tweeting impact will be low. Authority in communication can maximize the ROI objectives of your Twitter account. Here are the areas where you can, guaranteed, reduce your Twitter Marketing influence and resulting ROI:
• Don’t reach out to influencers on the themes and topics of your industry
• Don’t generate immense positive sentiment around your tweet topics and themes
• Don’t generate weekly tweet volume and quality to match your critical competitors

Most Social Media Managers are trying to maximize their Twitter marketing ROI. As such, it may be easier to avoid these pitfalls to ensure that the Twitter channel performs optimally in its goal to deliver marketing wins and increased customer engagement.
Learn more about Terametric at: http://www.terametric.com/about

Tags: Customers, Engagement, marketing channel, marketing metrics, marketing roi, ROI, twitter, Twitter followers
Posted in Social Media ROI | View Comments

Social Media ROI is dead! Long Live Social Media ROI!

Posted in Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis, Uncategorized by Taariq Lewis on November 7th, 2010

Social Media ROI is dead because Social Media ROI is an absolute failure for marketing executives to measure in perfect financial terms. If I’m wrong, then you are welcome to use the comments section below to tell me your complete and verifiable, Social Media, financial impact on your business operations. I will mail a free Terametric hat to anyone who can show me that they deliver testable and repeatable Social Media ROI, every day, to their CMO or CFO.

Source: Sequoia Capital

Why is it dead?
Social media impacts more than just the social media channels in which we have outbound communications and inbound customer call-to-action. Its scope touches all channels of customer engagement, both inbound and outbound. Social media gets customers into your stores to chat with your frontline employees. It gets customers to download your eBook for a free trial. It terrifies your competitors into trying to imitate instead of innovate. It allows your sales executive to be an industry thought leader via Twitter or his company blog where customers can engage in a conversation. Thus, social media impacts several aspects of business operations, most likely, leading to severely underestimated ROI estimates.

3 ways you can lift your Social Media ROI and marketing impact
Social media forces us to engage our marketing mix forecast and execution as an integrated marketing effort. If you’re busy trying to prove Social media ROI, forget it. Here are 3 ways you should maximize your Social media ROI and impact on your business without the struggle to justify an exact financial measure.

1. Make sure you are maximizing the return on your marketing efforts in the social media channels that you have the biggest need. What are the most critical outbound channels on which your customer are responding? What are the inbound factors that you can monitor for social media impact?

2.Monitor your top 5 competitors to understand which social media channels deliver to them the highest marketing impact. If they’re getting multiple retweets from their customer service Twitter accounts, then where and how are you investing your customer Twitter engagements?

3.Look for testable correlations between your outbound efforts and the inbound impacts. Yes! You can test correlation daily, weekly, monthly! Deliver greater effort to the correlations that you can test over a sustained period, no less than 2 weeks. Positive correlations will make it easy to identify the causes while competing effectively to lift Social media impact on your marketing mix.

Just because we can’t yet perfectly measure Social media ROI doesn’t mean we can’t measure Social media impact and the resulting return on the rest of our marketing and selling activities. Long live Social Media ROI as our focus on measuring the value of this new medium will give marketers better insight into where they should invest precious marketing and sales resources.

Tags: marketing channel, marketing investment, Social Media Measurement, Social Media ROI, Social Media Strategy
Posted in Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis, Uncategorized | View Comments

Terametric signs Netezza

Posted in Social Media ROI by Matt Carter on April 9th, 2010

Terametric marks an important milestone today; we’ve signed on a customer, Netezza (NYSE: NZ), a leader in data warehouse appliance technology. We’re thrilled to be working with an organization of Netezza’s marketing caliber. With a competitive set that features Oracle and IBM, Terametric will provide them with the kind of intelligence needed to maximize their marketing investment.

“With so much hype surrounding social media and so many marketing agencies jumping on this bandwagon, it’s hard to get any real sense of how to best leverage this new marketing channel – particularly in the context of the high-end B2B segment Netezza occupies”, said Tim Young, Vice President of Corporate Marketing for Netezza. “With Terametric, we are able to measure the effectiveness of each of our marketing channels, gain insight from the wealth of data collected and ensure we have necessary balance. This means our investment in our social media marketing programs is at a level that is appropriate to the value derived.” Young continued.

Many companies seek this type of measurement from social media monitoring tools but, without true cross-channel measurement capability, these tools are quite limited in their measurement scope. No tools have enabled marketers to understand what they want to know most: the ROI of each channel. This makes it’s difficult for businesses to know how effective their marketing strategies are and to allocate resources appropriately.

With Terametric, marketing performance is communicated comprehensively as an organization’s score, which quantifies a company’s ability to attract, engage and retain customers. This score can then be broken down into individual, channel-specific scores. Comparing individual channel scores allows organizations to understand the factors affecting their marketing performance and provides a valuable roadmap for marketing channel optimization.

This methodology not only quantifies the effect that one channel’s performance has on other channels, it tracks performance change over time and makes it possible to calculate marketing ROI.

Terametric also enables Tim to measure, analyze and score the social-media performance of Netezza’s competitors. In a market filled with strong competitors, the information provided byTerametric is invaluable in helping Tim magnify the power of his group’s marketing success and keep Netezza on the cutting edge of marketing.

Tags: marketing channel, marketing roi, Social Media
Posted in Social Media ROI | View Comments

Putting Social Media in its Place, Pt2: Social Intelligence KPIs

Posted in Strategy and Analysis by Matt Carter on March 14th, 2010

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we explored the limitations of channel measurement and how this often silo’d, measurement approach rarely reflects the customer reality:

“Many companies align their marketing departments according to channel teams . . . It’s easy to understand how this structure would make operational sense for a large organization. It makes for a very clear and concise organizational chart. Yet, customers are rarely funneled down these discreet and carefully delineated paths. The target’s path is often blurred and meandering, crossing several marketing channels before arriving at “customer-hood”. All acknowledge this reality, yet measurement structures rarely reflect it.“

A “measurement bridge”, between channels, is needed to create an accurate view of comprehensive marketing performance.

Social Media can become the measurement bridge between individual marketing channels. When leveraged properly, data from Social Media acts as an adhesive, binding individual channel performance into an accurate, holistic view.

With data carefully gathered from metrics and conversations in the social web and inbound performance metrics, Terametric calculates a series of Key Performance Indicators. These KPIs span the entire marketing channel mix and provide decision-makers with a comprehensive and detailed view of a company’s ability to attract, engage and retain customers. Collectively, we refer to these KPIs as Social Intelligence:

Social Intelligence is first calculated for each individual channel based on its inbound performance. Each individual channel’s Social Intelligence is then aggregated into a comprehensive brand Social Intelligence. In this part of the series, we’ll discuss selected KPIs in greater detail, explaining the valuable role they play in providing an accurate and holistic picture of marketing performance.

Engagement
A measure of your ability and willingness to engage with your audience. Ultimately, it is the measure of how much of a voice you have in the competitive marketplace, how much that voice resonates and how effectively that voice captures the interest of your community. Channel engagement is calculated from several data points, through multiple sources. An Engagement Score for the web channel is factored, in part from, an analysis of reviews, traffic sources, content consumption, etc.

Loyalty
Is calculated by measuring the average length and depth of an engaged customer relationship. Continuing with the web channel example, Loyalty is calculated, in part, by factoring depth of visit, length of visit, regency, repetition and average visitor volume for a period of time specified by the channel’s assigned priority.

Retention
As a holistic score, Retention denotes the frequency that you attract repeat engagements across multiple channels and how often a single customer is exposed to more than one channel. As a web channel measure, Retention is factored, in part, by bounce rate and visitor trending over a defined period of time. Much like Loyalty, the period of time is set by the channel’s pre-determined priority to the overall marketing effort.

Sentiment
A hot button topic for many trying to measure Social Media, SOCIALtality creates a multi-dimension Sentiment assessment. For both multi and single channel analysis, Sentiment is scored according to Over-arching reaction, Energy-level and demonstrated Trust. Given the margin of error for existing natural language processing (NLP), Sentiment Analysis and the complexity of assessment.

In the next part of our series, we’ll explore the other dimensions of Social Intelligence and share some of our proprietary Social Intelligence data visualizations. As always, if you have any questions, see any holes, object to or rally behind anything you’ve read, let us know in the comments section and we’ll address the with alacrity!

Tags: marketing channel, Social Intelligence Engine, social media analysis, Social Media Measurement, Social Media ROI, Social Media Strategy
Posted in Strategy and Analysis | View Comments

Putting Social Media in its Place, Pt 1: The Beleaguered CMO

Posted in Social Media ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Matt Carter on March 11th, 2010

In two of our previous postings, Bridging the Social Media Silo and Are you Blindly Optimizing Your Marketing, we discussed some common themes that emerged during our Alpha Qualification work. Many companies align their marketing departments according to channel teams. One team has responsibility for the website, another is charged with SEO/SEM and yet another has responsibility for print and/or broadcast. In many organizations, a brand new team silo has been created to leverage social media. Each team is responsible for tracking and reporting on the performance of their designated area.

It’s easy to understand how this structure would make operational sense for a large organization. It makes for a very clear and concise organizational chart. Yet, customers are rarely funneled down these discreet and carefully delineated paths. The target’s path is often blurred and meandering, crossing several marketing channels before arriving at “customer-hood”. All acknowledge this reality, yet measurement structures rarely reflect it.

The often-beleaguered CMO is then left to make sense of a channel measurement structure that compares apples to oranges and bares little resemblance to the customer reality. How can marketing investments be effectively optimized with only a partial or misleading picture available? Is it any wonder that these under-appreciated, Captains of Marketing have an average corporate life expectancy of 22.9 months?

So, how does a company develop a clearer picture of marketing’s effect on the target? How can companies determine which channels perform and which lag as the target zig-zags across them? How can a company be certain that their marketing investment is optimized to turn targets into customers?

Social Media may hold the key.

In our recent posting, The World’s Largest Source of Target Data, we spoke of Social Media as an incredible collection of data points:

Social Media is an almost limitless source of data about the habits, lifestyles, opinions, relationships and behaviors of an incredibly diverse pool of people . . . More than 100 million people have swelled the ranks of social media visitors in just two short years. Today, the total pool of individuals stands at more than 300 million strong, roughly the equivalent of every man, woman and child in the United States.

With such a repository of data available and with the right tool, Social Media can become the measurement bridge between individual marketing channels. When leveraged properly, data from Social Media acts as an adhesive, binding individual channel performance into an accurate, holistic view.

Our methodology combines the detailed measurement and analysis of each individual marketing channel. . .

. . . with data carefully gathered from Social Media to inform a series of Key Performance Indicators. These KPIs span the entire marketing channel mix and provide decision-makers with a comprehensive and detailed view of a company’s ability to attract, engage and retain customers. Collectively, we refer to these KPIs as Social Intelligence:

In our next post, we’ll define these KPIs in detail and provide examples of their use and organizational value (dare we say ROI Calculation). In the meantime, if you have any questions, please put them in the comments section and we’ll respond as soon as we’re able.

Photo by PatrickSmithPhotography

Tags: marketing channel, Social Intelligence Engine, Social Media Measurement, Social Media ROI, Social Media Strategy
Posted in Social Media ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments

Bridging the Social Media Silo

Posted in Strategy and Analysis by Matt Carter on March 6th, 2010

In the last several weeks, the Terametric team has spoken with several potential, enterprise-level AlphaTesters. It’s an exciting time to be a part of an organization bringing an unprecedented level of measurement, analysis and ultimately, accountability to both Social Media and a company’s full, marketing channel mix. Each week, we’re discovered by a growing crowd of newly-intrigued individuals.

I’d love to believe that our awareness-building efforts are solely responsible for generating this momentum, yet I think it has more to do with internal changes in the organizations themselves. Companies are moving beyond Trial Phase of Social Media Maturity in growing numbers. They’ve become comfortable with entry-level monitoring and measurement and now seek an intelligence solution that can match the organization’s growing desire to leverage Social Media more strategically.

Yet, we find evidence of measurement silos in many of these organizations. We often begin our presentations with the following graphic, illustrating what our measurement and analysis methodology encompasses:

More often than not, this graphic is greeted with a small amount of hesitancy and trepidation. It seems that many organizations divide their communications channel responsibilities among several different groups. We find the biggest divide is often between the Website Team (those with responsibility for maintaining and optimizing the site, often including SEO and SEM) and the Social Media Team. The Web Team is often more closely associated with the IT Group and the Social Media Team seems to be closely aligned with Events or Outbound Marketing Teams.

As companies begin to approach Social Media more strategically, it is essential that they bridge the internal gaps between Teams and responsibility silos in order to create an environment conducive to true Marketing Optimization. Without an integrated, holistic picture of performance encompassing all channels, true optimization may elude even the most strategic organizations.

The first step is to identify a measurement solution that can measure and analyze each channel’s performance and then quantify the relationships between channel performance. A tool like ours can help a company fully understand and quantify how a focused Social Media effort can affect organic search and the receptivity of the audience to the latest email campaign. We aren’t the only tool out there, but I think we might be the most comprehensive. Many organizations rely on monitoring tools yet, there scope is often limited to the measurement of conversation threads, share of voice, etc. We’ve found that reliance on these tools can sometimes strengthen rather than break down the walls that separate marketing teams.

Step two should be the creation of a cross-functional marketing group. Perhaps by taking the leader of each individual team, an organization could create a marketing “steering committee” whose members collectively share the responsibility for marketing’s big picture and report directly to the CMO. This group would share the CMO’s responsibility for the big picture and could be tasked with creating the type of cross-channel, long-term initiatives that can be difficult to create in a more delineated marketing structure.

How have your organizations bridged the marketing silos?

Image by Luke Olsen

Tags: marketing channel, Social Intelligence Engine, Social Media Measurement, Social Media Strategy
Posted in Strategy and Analysis | View Comments

The World’s Largest Source of Target Data

Posted in Strategy and Analysis by Matt Carter on February 21st, 2010

Wendy Troupe and I were speaking to Nathan Gilliatt this morning about the nature of analysis, measurement and social media. The conversation ranged across a variety of topics: from his recent and very successful AnalyticsCamp in Chapel Hill to the occurrence measurement silos (we all agreed, by the way, that measurement silos stink and rob you of true cross-channel, big-picture insight). During that conversation, Nathan said something that stopped the coffee cup halfway to my lips. It was eloquent, simple and yet, profound:

“[If you set aside the corporate desire for engagement], Social Media becomes a set of really powerful, publicly-available, data points.” (paraphrasing, Nathan said it much better)

Social Media is an almost limitless source of data about the habits, lifestyles, opinions, relationships and behaviors of an incredibly diverse pool of people. According to a post by Brian Solis, covering the latest Neilsen report, that pool is growing at an amazing rate:

Global Visitors to Social Networking Sites

More than 100 million people have swelled the ranks of social media visitors in just two short years. Today, the total pool of individuals stands at more than 300 million strong, roughly the equivalent of every man, woman and child in the United States. It should be noted, however, that less than half of the social media citizens (142,052,000) are actually from the United States.

Not only does Social Media provide detailed data on an incredibly diverse group of people, it may also eliminate what Quantum Theorists like to call, “observation contamination”:

“One of the most bizarre premises of quantum theory, which has long fascinated philosophers and physicists alike, states that by the very act of watching, the observer affects the observed reality.”

In a recent post, we explored this tenet of Quantum Theory and applied it to the Social Media space:

“This premise has long cast a tiny shadow of invalidating doubt on all manner of research. Primary marketing research like focus groups, usability testing, interviews and even surveys are no exception. The simple act of observing an action or response can to some degree skew that action or response.

Yet, today, an array of Social Media tools provides marketers and brand managers with an unprecedented way to access the actions and conversations of a particular group in such a way that the group isn’t cognizant of the observation.”

Couple this amazing pool of data with the elimination of “observation contamination” and those companies with the right analysis tools have an opportunity to learn about their targets in unprecedented ways.

In yesterday’s #SocialMedia Chat, Ken Burbary discussed how Social Media is changing the nature of target segmentation. Ken did a great job of providing an interesting framework and guiding the discussion when needed. Participants all agreed that Social Media doesn’t just change the nature of target segmentation, it forces it and our notions of what’s knowable to evolve.

Our understanding of the target is no longer limited to static demographic, psychographic and geographic data. We can now study their interactions, relationships, use of platforms, personalities, preferences, habits and behaviors in real time. We can literally watch them unfold before our very eyes.

If your company isn’t leveraging the power of social media to study the target, you can bet your competitors are. Social Media analysis should be a part of the customer study in every strategic marketing plan. If your company is like many, you may need to shift dollars from another marketing program to fund social media’s inclusion. If so, maybe it should come from your marketing research budget?

Tags: marketing channel, ROI, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Measurement, Social Media ROI, Social Media Strategy, Social Media Tools
Posted in Strategy and Analysis | View Comments

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