Success Measuring Social Media

Boston’s Social Media Butterflies
Meet to Discuss Social Media Measurement Success

Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO & Founder of KDPaine & Partners wants to encourage others to kick butt in the social media space! Katie, alongside a panel of other successful social media experts started the conversation off with that statement at last night’s Social Media Club Boston event. Attending were some of the top social media butterflies in the city all seeking to share new insights and grasp new ways to measure this new social phenomenon through different means.

Consider social media as one important “spoke” on a large marketing wheel which includes using other channels both online and offline to reach your audience. As Jamie Pappas, Social Media Strategy Manager  for EMC mentioned, “I like to think we are doing the butt kicking,” but it’s important as a marketer to make sure that you are integrating your marketing efforts and continue to prove the value of each initiative to the executives.

Finding Out Where The Buzz Goes

Bill Carlson, Editor-in-Chief of CIO.com mentions how much social media can provide a window of opportunity to connect better with the audience where you can react to something in real-time, while Holly Allison, VP of Marketing for Vico  software was pleased with the success of her guest blogger campaign. She was able to attract new thought leaders to write blogs and shared Vlogs of individuals on Youtube as each became a spokesperson to champion her brand.

Go out there and listen to what people are saying, rely on such sites as Trackur, Social Mention and Twendz to see what all the chatter is about your brand and react appropriately. Start responding to questions, identifying new keywords being searched to find your product, or make changes to your campaign instantly. As marketers, we need to discover the best ways to interpret the results of social media so companies realize it’s sticking around and believe it’s not just for free. It takes support, time, and creative ingenuity just as any other department to be effective, but more importantly social media can save costs to a company that opens a new means to conduct focus groups, improve customer service, and empower the audience.

Where’s The ROI?

As new technology emerges, marketers can better quantify results of social media to generate potential leads that convert to sales. Chris Penn, VP of Strategy and Innovation of Blue Sky  email marketing has been successful aligning a baseline each quarter between the goals set within Google Analytics and the percent of quality leads generated into Sales Force. Chris shared his formula (Earnings – Spent/ # of Leads) for gathering the amount of money earned across different digital marketing efforts and comparing it to the amount of money spent as a percentage of the number of leads generated to drive sales. He can further examine the ROI of each tweet, blog post, PPC campaign, email and more by using Google Analytics URL Builder. Set a unique URL to track instances of where people are learning more about your product or service and how it can help to measure your overall conversion.  Mike Proulx, VP of Interactive Marketing at Hill Holiday  relies on Meteor Solutions to embed a tracking code that can be associated with different incidences of traffic sources coming in from Twitter, Facebook, or other mediums.

What about the people that live outside of social media and how does one measure their impact on your brand? It’s very important to validate not only the discussions online, but make a point to be engaged with your audience in other ways through face-to-face encounters, customer service calls, and keep track of other interactions where people that form impressions around your brand. Keep abreast of not only the top influencers in your market, but don’t neglect the people creating a buzz in smaller communities. Over time people come together to form their own community and you don’t want to risk not paying attention to the messages, nor miss a new business opportunity to your competitor.

Not everyone is immersed in the online social scene and there are many other audiences that are not accounted for when you quantify results. However, you can establish a dashboard unique to your business comprised of the different touch points the customer is engaged prior to a purchase of product. Carry that information forward followed by the actions after that purchase.

Mike offered his thoughts around creating a dashboard that reflects the goals of marketing and how to evaluate its impact on the overall strategy. There are many ways to look across both the qualitative and quantitative measurements to comprise a picture for management that makes sense of your business and can help marketers prioritize their efforts.