… as discussed at the MicroStrategy Social Media Marketing and iCommerce Summit in Monte Carlo.
Media expert and author of marketing book Engage, Brian Solis claims that marketers are not using data available via social media to understand their customers, objectives or measure ROI.
“It can’t just be about conversation,” he said. “This has to be at the beginning; what is it that you want out of it [social media]?”
Solis said brands’ lack of understanding about who their customers are is holding them back from being able to use social media to impact their bottom line. He added that brands should use their own proprietary data, as well as tap into the social data of their consumers by using different tools, such as APIs, or influencer measurement tools.
Head of social media at agenda21, Barry Bridges, gives you his views on the issue:
“I think there’s a big difference between a brand being ‘unable’ to measure social media vs being ‘able to decide on what to measure’.
For me, Marshall Sponder hits the nail on the head when he talks about the concept of ‘reverse ROI’ which is where social media excels. If you approach any social activity from the perspective of ‘what money are we going to make from this’ – even if you trace that objective back via softer metrics like engagement, reach etc – then you miss a key issue which is that (as Sponder says) there is an element of ‘Reverse ROI’ created by social media.
That is to say, ROI is measured not just by sales, customers or engagement, but by money saved, opportunities rescued or disasters averted. That is where social media is valuable, but where brands often fail to measure.
In some ways I believe the key problem for brands is that there are too many things available for measurement – and too many tools telling them that their view of the world is the correct one. Take influence, for example. In practical terms, it is impossible to calculate despite the very valuable attempts by Klout and PeerIndex (who do a good job, by the way). But in spite of this, brands have multiple tools telling them that their list of influencers is the ‘right one’, which is clearly nonsense.
What needs to happen is measurement and monitoring to mature as an industry a little bit, become more of a social science a la market research (with robust methodology and good cerebral effort from analysts rather than twinterns) and for improved honesty from software providers – for them to say ‘we’re good at getting the data, but you need brains to do the analysis’ rather than them trying to tell us that their interpretation of the numbers is the absolute and only one”.
Barry Bridges
head of social @ agenda21 digital
“Great piece Barry! Ultimately we want to measure the brands ability to reach their audience directly and have some sort of relationship with them and of course attribute the right economic value back to that. Personally I am extremely interested in new features coming from paid and free analytics vendors in this space. In particular tracking social actions on site as well as understand what role social has further up the funnel. With the release of Omniture’s SocialAnalytics, Web Trends deep integration with Radian 6 data and a host of new features from Google Analytics, it is clear that everyone wants in. Marshal Sponder (what a great name?) does indeed hit the on nail that social cannot be measured with a traditional last click site or revenue metric, for another view point see ch9 of Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaishik”.
Sam Frazier
web analyst @ agenda21 digital
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