I wanted to share this simple but excellent presentation from Egg Co on measuring Return on Investment from social media.
Here's a quick summary:
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The qualitative benefits of social media are obvious (e.g. building trust, loyalty, brand awareness), but these are also seen as hard to measure
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To measure the ROI of social media activities, we need to move past conventional metrics for success
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Marketers should figure out simple, commercial success metrics, for example: "reduction in support costs", "number of new things we discovered about customers that we never knew before" (my favourite is "number of minutes a day we spent being nice to customers")
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Set campaign goals based on these, "your return is successfully meeting or exceeding these goals"
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Implement campaign, drop the stuff does doesn't achieve the goals. Repeat.
This is a simple but very important framework when considering investment in social media. Without a true focus on creating measurable business value, there is a real risk that organizations will end up just creating more noise and wasting their investment.
(I stumbled across this courtesy of We are social's blog, which is always a great source of interesting stuff)