Tag: Jeremiah Owyang

Reporting, Social Media

A Great Starting Point for Social Media ROI

Posted on by Eric Peterson

Yesterday, I wrote about my beef with the popular cliché that “ROI for social media is Return on Influence.” This latest take was prompted by Connie Bensen’s ROI of a Community Manager post that has some great thoughts when it comes to measuring the value of social media.

As I put in my last post, quantifying the results of your social media investment is a worthwhile endeavor. Mapping those results to business value can be tricky, but it’s important to make the effort. As I implied yesterday, a Darwinian Take on Business says that the key decisionmakers are probably pretty sharp about the business they’re helping to run. They’re probably not sitting back and making every decision based on a simplistic ROI calculation. Talk to them about the business when you’re talking about social media.

Connie’s post has a pretty great point to start with this exercise. And, at the risk of exhibiting excruciatingly poor form blogging-wise, I’m just going to repeat it here. This is Connie’s list of the ways that investing in social media can provide value to the company. The investment can:

  • Humanize the company by providing a voice
  • Nurture the community & encourage growth
  • Communicate directly with the customers
  • Connect customers to appropriate internal departments
  • Ensure that messaging will connect
  • Build brand awareness through word of mouth
  • Lower market research costs
  • Add more points in the purchase cycle
  • Provide support to customers that have fallen thru the cracks
  • More satisfied customers because they’ve been involved with product development
  • Shorten length of product development cycle
  • Build public relations for brand with influentials in the industry
  • Identify strengths & weaknesses of competitors
  • Collaborate & partner with related organizations
  • Provide industry trends to the executive level

Which of these resonate the most with you as something that your company values highly or that your company is struggling to do effectively? How do you know that? Are there anecdotes that are widely circulated? Are there metrics that get shared regularly to either illustrate how important the area is to the company…or how much of an uphill battle the company is facing?

Start there. Don’t jump from what you come up with on that front to “…and here’s what we’re going to measure.” Start there and then develop a social media strategy (read more of Connie’s blog…and Jeremiah Owyang’s…and Chris Brogan’s…and others for tips on that). From that strategy, you can then develop your measures — the way you’re going to assess the value of your social media efforts.

Photo courtesy of cambodia4kidsorg

0
Reporting, Social Media

Social Media Success Metrics. Or…at Least Objectives.

Posted on by Eric Peterson

Jeremiah Owyang has a post on his Web Strategist blog titled Why Your Social Media Plan should have Success Metrics. Based on the URL of the post, it looks like Owyang initially titled the entry “Why Your Social Media Plan should Indicate What Does Success Look Like.” Admittedly, the original title is a bit clunky. But, in the cleanup, he actually oversimplified the main point of his post, which is that it’s important to have some clear idea of why you’re tackling social media and some idea what you’re hoping to get out of it. He includes some examples:

A few examples of what success could look like for you:

  • We were able to learn something about customers we’ve never know before
  • We were able to tell our story to customers and they shared it with others
  • A blogging program where there are more customers talking back in comments than posts
  • An online community where customers are self-supporting each other and costs are reduced
  • We learn a lot from this experimental program, and pave the way for future projects, that could still be a success metric
  • We gain experience with a new way of two-way communication
  • We connect with a handful of customers like never before as they talk back and we listen
  • We learned something from customers that we didn’t know before

One of the commenters correctly pointed out that none of these examples were “metrics” per se. I say, “Cool!” Owyang’s point is spot on — be clear on why you’re tackling social media. And, you know what? If it’s, “Because I don’t understand it and don’t ‘get’ it and figure the best way to learn is to dive in and do it,” then that’s okay! Of course, if that is the only reason you are dipping your phallanges into social media, then you should also set a target date for when you’re going to evaluate whether you are going to continue — with more focussed objectives — or whether you are going to reduce your focus on it.

The metrics will come. Sometime, they’re not crisp, clean, perfect metrics. That’s okay. I’m a fan of proxy measures, as well as the occasional use of subjective measures. Quantitative measures that aren’t tied to clear objectives, on the other hand, drive me bonkers.

So, what are my objectives with this part of my personal social media experimenting? Very simply, they’re as follows:

  • See if I can “do” it — post with some level of substance on a sustained basis
  • Give myself an outlet for expressing my opinions and frustrations about data usage (when it’s not appropriate to express them directly to the person who triggered the need for an outlet)
  • Learn about blogging technologies

The jury is still a bit out on the first objective, but it’s looking like the answer is, “I can.”

I am clearly hitting the second objective (and will continue to do so).

I’ve become intimate with both Blogger and WordPress, as well as dabbled with Technorati, Feedburner, Yahoo! Pipes, and any number of social networking and social bookmarking platforms, so I’d say I’m well on my way to the third.

I’m not feeling the need to reset my objectives just yet.

0