The Hunt For Social Media ROI

Metrics and Measurement The Hunt for Social Media ROI Scott Schablow Chief Strategic Officer Provenance Digital Media

Opening Thought

“ Social media is like teen sex.

Everyone wants to do it.

Nobody knows how.

When it’s finally done there is

surprise it’s not better.”

Avonash Kaushik – Analytics Evangelist, Google

Measuring ROI

Traditional Measurement

Investment $30,000

Yield = 1000 leads

Cost Per lead = $30

Measuring ROI

Social Media Measurement

Comments + Conversation + Facebook x Twitter = Success

Huh ?

Measuring ROI

“ What do you want to measure the “social” or the “media” - David Alston of Radian6

Media: traditional measurement = quantitative

Social: untraditional measurement = qualitative

What Do You Want To Measure?

Number of influential blogs that linked to us.

Increase in Pagerank Reduction in complaints

Number of repeat, unique visitors

Number of new ideas that were implemented

Number of Tweets about us Number of new leads

Number of leads converted into sales

Number of new insights gained about customers’ attitudes

Reduction in support costs

Amount of increase in satisfaction

Meaningful Metrics

20,000 Twitter followers

200 Interested, engaged followers who are qualified prospects

Meaningful Metrics

What metric can you measure that management considers valuable?

Consider that indirect benefits often lead to sales (they’re just harder to measure)

Meaningful Metrics

Media: traditional measurement = quantitative

Meaningful Metrics

Media: bean counters & cash = quantitative

Meaningful Metrics

Media: bean counters & cash = quantitative

Social: authority & loyalty = qualitative

Meaningful Metrics

Quantitative - $ales, qualified leads, re-acquisitions

Qualitative – authority, interaction, loyalty, satisfaction, feedback

Meaningful Metrics often are:

Intangible benefits

Reasonably likely to create sales, loyalty and brand evangelism

Quantitative ROI Cases

SeaWorld San Antonio's

Journey to Atlantis social media campaign

SeaWorld: Journey to Atlantis

Campaign Objectives:

Build relationships with the coaster community

Build awareness of Journey to Atlantis

Assist in driving visitation to the park

Campaign Strategy:

Initial research phase

Targeted list of 22 coaster enthusiast blogs & forums identified

Treat coaster bloggers as a VIP audience

Content rich Web site was deployed as the hub for content and information

Implementation:

Eleven videos & a 45-photo portfolio that spanned from construction to opening day were created

Deployed with a Creative Commons license on YouTube, Flickr & Veoh

Used on the SeaWorld Coasters multimedia site

Coaster Enthusiast group were invited to attend the media launch day and to be among the first to ride Journey to Atlantis

Desired Results:

Links from coaster sites

Attendees at the media day

Ongoing contact.

Actual Results:

Of 22 sites identified, 12 covered the ride, including Theme Park Insider

The campaign received 50 links from unique Web sites, 30 were from coaster enthusiast sites

The American Coaster Enthusiasts group brought 30 members to ride Journey to Atlantis on media day. These riders later left positive comments on YouTube videos

SeaWorld San Antonio attended its annual meeting in 2008. The relationship is ongoing

Actual Results:

Budget for the campaign about $44,000

Overall, the cost per impression for the social media campaign was $0.22 versus $1.00 for television

Used an internal formula that applies a value to each visitor to the park (per cap rate)

The online group represented more than $2.6 million in revenue.

Southwest Airlines

“ Southwest Airlines attributes more than $1 million in additional ticket sales to it’s presence on Twitter”

Marriott

"Marriott has made more than $5 million in bookings from people who clicked through to the reservation page from Marriott's blog."

Qualitative ROI Cases

Qualitative ROI Cases Campaign to Innovate Products & Service Success Metrics Goal By Amount of good suggestions that company hadn’t thought of N amount of suggestions collected per month and N amount that you actually implement Starbucks Amount of above that you actually implement

Qualitative ROI Cases

Measuring Authority

Success Metrics Goal By Amount of influential blogs linking to you N Pagerank by a certain date CopyBlogger Pagerank relative to competitors Nth position in Pagerank relative to competitors by a certain date Amount of organic traffic per month N% of organic traffic per month Amount of traffic that converts to sales $N per month attributable to referrals from blog

Metrics – Tools of the Trade

What do you want to measure?

Web analytics fall short for social media

Social Media Metrics

Plug-in for Google Analytics

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/35080

Metrics – Types of ROI Measurement

1. Post-project ROI

2. Efficiency gains or cost avoidance

3. Proxy Metrics

4. Product/Service/Process Innovation

5. Improved Conversions

6. Digitalization of knowledge

7. Social capital and empowerment of the workforce

Metrics – Types of ROI Measurement

Some quick tools and suggestions:

Create campaigns & events specifically for social media. Then customize your analytics software to make it easy to track those events.

Track a specific Twitter traffic campaign or DiggBar URL with campaigns.

Organize a dashboard and set up email reports. To get specific information on social media, have traffic stats from top social media websites (i.e. Digg, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) emailed to you so you can see it all in one place.

Summary