A legacy of traditional marketing practice and measurement methods have established themselves as firm and accepted foundations for the measurement of ROI from a client side perspective. While there is value in such measurables; the social web has introduced many other factors that can be used to measure ROI that are new and unfamiliar to many. Engagement levels, sentiment, Klout, Re-Tweets, Likes; the list is endless and the methods of collecting and interpreting data disparate. While this is a problem many community managers can overcome with various tools and innate understanding of these processes; it causes a fundamental confusion and miss-interpretation on the part of those who really want to see and understand the results; “the client”.
The Value of Social Analytics
In competitive market places, information has always been essential to making informed marketing decisions and defining future business development. There is an overwhelming plethora of tools available that allow us to measure ROI, engagement levels and other measurable factors.
“Monitoring social media has become very important for companies, says Steven Georgiadis, head of customer intelligence at the SAS Institute. SAS is one of the top software firms for business analytics software and is now pushing hard into the market for social media monitoring.” (BBC, 2010)
A Fundamental Miss-Understanding
Clients are often overwhelmed by the amount of raw data available to them from multiple sources. There is often a fundamental miss-interpretation of the value and reasoning behind content creation, distribution and audience consumption; social media has led to an evolving approach that challenges the legacy paved for us by traditional marketing techniques. Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0 summarises the need for this evolution:
“One of the least understood phenomena of the last few years is how the fundamental nature of content creation, distribution, and consumption has changed. Most marketeers are unprepared to take advantage of this shift, most web analytics vendors have not evolved their core data collection mechanisms, and most analysts have not yet adapted their measurement techniques.” (Kaushik, 2010, p.242)
Social Media is a Foreign Language
Confusion and lack of clarity often leads to questions regarding the ROI of social campaigns, and in some sense this is often justifiable. Community managers must keep in mind that clients may not have prior knowledge of measurables that are described in a vocabulary that to them is tantamount to a foreign language and doubles in size by the time they have had time to get to grips with it.
Scepticism of social media marketing is rooted in lack of understanding
A core component then of any successful social campaign and client relationship is to facilitate learning. Teaching clients the language associated with new forms of measurement allows clients to better relate to the advantages and forms of ROI that are central to a successful strategy. Often scepticism of social media marketing is rooted in lack of understanding and available knowledge. While information and knowledge is abundant in today’s network society, “why don’t clients just Google it?!” we must remember that the overwhelming amount of information available is intimidating to those new to social. Much the same way as a French teacher guides us through the process of understanding a new language, community managers need to nurture clients into social media, providing re-assurance every step of the way; this helps avoid a backlash of scepticism and frustration and allows clients to better understand the true value of social media to their organisations.
Your experiences?
Whether your a sceptical client, or a seasoned community manager, we would love to hear about your experiences with social media measurement and analytics.