With the ever-increasing popularity of social networking sites, there are many companies working fervently to get a social media campaign in place before the trend has passed. Unfortunately, many companies rush out to create a Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace accounts without a clear understanding of the tools, not to mention any sort of strategy or plan. This practice does not lead to a successful social media campaign, and can hurt a company more than it can help.

In order to truly succeed with social media, companies need to focus more on the wants and needs of their audience, and less on the individual tools. Here is a strategy to help determine what social media can do for you:

Forget the Tools

The first step to figuring out what to do with social media is to forget everything you know about social media. Stop thinking about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Delicious, Digg, and start thinking about WHY people are using these tools. People use Twitter to communicate ideas and share links, Facebook for connecting with Friends and sharing media, etc....

Understanding the concepts behind the tools will help guide you in the right direction.

Start Listening

Next, take a look around the web and see where your audience is living online, by listening, searching through blogs, community sites, and other places where you may find people interested in your product. Pay special attention when you find people complaining about your website or lack of social interaction, and use these criticisms to enhance your overall visitor experience. In a sense, we can think of the social web as the world's largest (and least expensive) focus group.
 

Set Goals

At this point you should have a general sense of what your audience is looking for in the social media space, and you can start to build out some simple goals for your efforts. Goals should clearly state what you hope to gain from social media interactions:

•    Increase conversations within community
•    Increase traffic to landing pages
•    Increase in blog subscribers
•    Decrease custom service complaints
•    (You get the idea)

Then you must decide on how you're going to measure your social media efforts.

Select Tools

Now that we have talked through the audience needs and your goals, we can finally begin to think about the tools again. However, before you start planning the color scheme for your Twitter page, you still need to think about how to get the most out of these tools. One company may find value in an internal community platform, while another may utilize YouTube and Twitter -- it all depends on what you are trying to accomplish, and who you are trying to reach.

So, before you embark on your next social media campaign I would urge you to toss out the tools, and start thinking about how and why your audience will engage with your brand online.

Thoughts?

Photo Credit: Eric Gjerde
 

Anyone who has modeled ROI or IRR knows that inputs can be tweaked to get to the desired percentage or return.  That is why falling in love with a deal or program is so dangerous - you can always find a way to get to the return which justifies doing it.

That said, ROI is a necessary part of any business.  I share the philosophy that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.  Or sell it to your boss, for that matter.

A key in digital media is to understand the value drivers.  The key to understanding the value drivers is to understand the partner's underlying business and business objectives.  Understanding of the drivers and objectives, matched with digital channel skills, will enable the creation of a useful ROI model, based on direct or correlated data.  Cursory understanding or lip service, absent an old school push campaign or click to action, will probably beget a BS ROI measurement.  That is why New Markeitng Labs' most successful client relationships are partnerships, and include inputs from executives across business lines on both sides.

It helps to follow a few simple steps with the partner:

1. Meet with all stakeholders (PR, marketing-communications, IT, sales, branding, C-suite) to make sure you get the skinny on the business, the digital channel objectives, the internal politics, who controls the budget at hand and who is the digital channel's champion.
   
   
2. From this hodge podge of (often conflicting) interest groups, extrapolate what success really means to the partner, and work hard to understand the partner's true objectives in on and off line marketing.
   
   
3. Develop a campaign around these objectives, including a long discussion (up front) on what metrics will be tracked for success, what they will mean, and how they will be reported.
   
   
4. Build a business case - up front - on these metrics which justifies, or not, the investment.
   

This is 2010.  Enterprises are realizing that convergence is here, externally across platforms and internally across business units.  The digital channel is more than banners or social, and it impacts all parts of a business.  Digital is not a separate piece of the marketing pie, it is one of the ingredients.  The proportion of spend dedicated to digital is going up, and so are the eyeballs on the projects.  Without metrics, a partner will ultimately fail to achieve much, and the budget will disappear.

I was at a reception last week where someone told me about a social media campaign he had just run.  He said he had gained x thousand Facebook followers.  Then he looked at me and asked me if that was good.  I had no idea.  And, he didn't either.  Make sure the metrics are relevant.

And, what if the data being measured shows a poor ROI?  Give it ample time, then change the metric or the program.  Fast.  It doesn't take months to turn the digital boat around, it takes days.  If it can't be assessed with any certainty, figure out why and fix it.  If the answer continues not to make sense, change the team.

A recent Babson study reported that 84% of worldwide professionals using social media tools don't measure ROI.  This will change in 2010.  Digital budgets are growing, and so is knowledge and accountability.  I can't measure it, but I know it's true.

What are your thoughts on measuring ROI in social media?

Photo by: Darrren Hester

In working with our various clients at New Marketing Labs, we like to start with measurement as it aligns to goals. We're always excited that people want to work with us, but we also want to make sure their time isn't wasted by simply "doing social media."

To that end, we start with an understanding of our clients' goals, and work from there into what kinds of measurements we might come up with to help them with their success. I don't talk about specific clients (as that's not part of our contract), but I'll share the general way we're going about working with clients in 2010, so that you can get a sense of how we're doing what we do. (My goal is to open conversations about how social media can be used effectively as part of business communications, including marketing and channel development.)

Our 8 Questions

In working with clients, I have eight questions that I like to ask to get a sense of what we might be able to do to improve business:

1. How can we fill your sales funnel?
2. How can we improve engagement?
3. How can we improve exposure and coverage?
4. How are we empowering your community to interact?
5. How do we grow sales from your community?
6. How can we build a voice and a new stage for your ideas?
7. How do we bridge your offline experiences with your online presence?
8. How are we extending to the mobile environment?
9. 
   

These questions don't always line up with what our clients are seeking for help, but they always get the conversation going in the direction of finding goals that will drive needles to move. Not all eight have to be answered, but you can see the measurements that would determine whether we've hit the mark on the above goals. Some are rooted in PR-type practice. Others are more marketing-minded. Still others are sales-focused. That's intentional. I don't purify when I work. I want the holistic approach. (Sometimes, this is an issue when dealing with clients, as they have one budget from which to pay us, and I often want to work on things that will improve other groups who aren't paying.)

What We Seek for Each Engagement

Again, these aren't hard, fast rules, but we try to build the following into every engagement:

• Measurement (dashboard)
• Methods (our approach)
• Materials (people and digital resources)
• Database (are we growing the client's database/list?)
• Effort (what goes into the project)
• Education (we never give people fish)
• Interfaces (which parts of the business do/can we touch)
• Crisis (if something goes wrong, then what?)
• Deep Wiring (can we build beyond just "marketing?")

When building our projects, we seek to work more like partners and channel developers than an agency. We're not there to come up with ideas and let others do all the work. We want to work side-by-side with our clients, and become partners in success. Having the above all answered helps us out in this regard.

But what about measuring?

Measurements

I'm fond of saying that my favorite measurement is the one with a dollar sign attached. I like helping companies find revenue. Barring that, or around that, we look at different measures for different projects. It depends on what the goals were, and the strategy we used to get there. Here are some sample measurements we've used at New Marketing Labs in the past:

This is is by NO MEANS inclusive of all the things we track.

• % of online conversation (versus competitor).
• % of coverage improvement.
• # of new subscribers/attendees/buyers via tracking links.
• # of new threads, comments, conversations for engagements.
• # of actions taken (for instance, on email newsletters).
• increase in $ per visitor, monthly average.
• # of leads
• # of sales call conversions
• unique visitors (all those basic web metrics)
• more

It depends what we're aiming for as to what we can work on delivering. To me, there are dozens and dozens of other ways to do metrics. (Resources are below.)

So Far, So Good

Our goal when we launched NML was to help companies figure out how to be human at a distance and what it means for business communications, including sales, marketing, PR, customer service, and internal collaboration. We work like a lab. We try things, we experiment, we do things differently than the traditional teams that are out there. So far, we've had mostly good response for our efforts (no one gets 100% success).

I'm proud of the work we've done, and looking forward to what we've got ahead of us in 2010. In writing this up, I just wanted to talk a bit about how I think metrics and measurements can be attained for social media efforts. It's not rocket surgery (to quote the smart Boston folks who coined that at IMS Boston). We find goals for our clients, we find ways to measure our efforts, and we work to succeed. Repeat as necessary. Make sense?

How about you? What are you doing? What's your approach?

Want to see how others do metrics? Here's a huge list from Robin Broitman.

Photo credit aussiegall