Do you need to draw some bright lines between your social media presence and business results? Have you been asked to prove the ROI of social media? It's no longer a question of if you should measure the business results of your social media interactions, but what to measure—and how. A new generation of tools based on mathematical modeling and natural language processing make it easier to draw the connections, but harder to determine which of the over 300+ tools you should use. From building marketing funnels and goals, to more complex analytics such as multi-channel media measurement and first-click attribution, the choices are getting more complicated. This presentation looks at a practical framework to build a social media measurement strategy and plan.
This presentation was first given at the Marketing Profs B2B Forum in Boston on October 4th, 2012. It was updated for CARMA on November 13, 2012.
3. Purpose of Measurement
Diagnose Prioritize Evaluate
• Diagnose: Determine what works and what doesn’t
• Prioritize: Build into planning, make decisions
• Evaluate: Demonstrate ROI, Business Value
7. Attention
• How many visits?
• How many fans?
• How many interactions?
• Estimated reach
• Demographics
8. Awareness
• Do they LIKE or comment?
• Are they mentioning you?
• What is your share of voice?
• How often do they visit?
• Who is referring?
9. Attitudes
• What is the sentiment?
• Are they committed?
• Are they satisfied?
• Would they recommend?
10. Actions
• What are the financial results?
• What is the value of customers?
• How are processes impacted?
• What innovations emerge?
• What about ROI?
12. ROI Defined
Return on Investment (ROI) is a measure of a
company’s profitability, equal to a fiscal year’s
income divided by equity and long-term debt;
and, ROI measures how effectively the
organization is using its resources to generate a
financial profit.
13. Revenue Events
Objective:
Increase registration for this year’s conference
Objective:
By prior to the event, over
will have registered using the “friends of
online influencer” and we will be
ahead of usual registration numbers.
16. Financial Customer
4 ways to
Measure SM
Results
Process Innovation
17. Financial Customer
Sales Cost of Support
Revenue Events Average Lifetime Value
Correlation and Regression Impact on Value
Results
Process Innovation
Leads and Closing New Ideas Adopted
Fulfillment Employee Turnover Rate
Channel Success Employee Satisfaction
19. Revenue Impact
of a Webinar
• Activities:
– Write a blog post about the webinar
– Put a short post on LinkedIn with a link to the
blog post
– Tweet the link to the blog post
• Cost: $150
• Return: 100 leads
– An average cost of a digital lead $40 x 100 = $4,000
– OR track actual conversions for true ROI
20. The control case
Isolate the variables
– Audience segmentation
– Timing or location segmentation
– Message segmentation
– A/B Testing
49. Anas Younes, MD: Lymphoma
MD Anderson
Problem: Too few people
signing up for clinical trials
Objective: Build reputation
And clinical trial base
Results: Quadrupled clinical
trial patients
50. Revenue and Cost
Campaign:
•Online Campaign Only
•Influencer Outreach
Measurement:
•Impressions
•Survey
Results:
•Cost per impression
•Television: $1
•Social Media: $.22
•ROI
$2.6 million in revenue http://bit.ly/JTAResults
51. Conversion
People: PR professionals and social media
consultants looking for inexpensive
monitoring solution for clients
Objective: 5,000 registered users, 500 users
to repeat weekly usage and 50 paying
customers
Strategy: Reach out to 10 top-tier bloggers,
and send out press release
Results: 102,394 unique users, and 7,874
registered users over 1 week post launch
52. • Launch:
January 2009
SOLD:
February 2010
$4 million
Some rights reserved by affiliatesummit Some rights reserved by shelisrael1
57. Social Media in the Workplace
out of
Trust is more important than $$
Limiting Social Media
30% 26%
25%
20% 14% 21%
15% Turn Down
10% Job 21%
5% 3%
0% Take Job
79% 79%
58. Talent Acquisition LinkedIn
• Unqualified Resumes
• Recruiter Fees
Link Humans by Laurent Brouat • Expatriate Costs
73. Kami Huyse
Zoetica, CEO
zoeticamedia.com
@kamichat
Links for this presentation:
http://www.diigo.com/
list/kamichat/mpb2bpreso
Editor's Notes
Factor in budgetCompare to competitorsBuild a dialogue with audience: “we heard you” – engagement process
It starts with SMART Objectiveshttp://overtonecomm.blogspot.com/2010/10/commonsense-social-media-measurement.htmlIn order to get results from your marketing and public relations programs, you have to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve. We call these SMART Objectives. They are:Specific: not vagueMeasurable: have numbers attached to themAttainable: Are not too easy, or too hard to achieveResults-Oriented: they are tied to business goalsTime Bound: They have a time frame by which they can be accomplishedAnother way to think of this, is by asking yourself:How many/much of X results to I hope to achieve by X date? How many, by when?Let’s look at an example of a SMART Objective…
Your activities are fine to track and they might be important to keep up the momentum, don’t stop there…Agencies tend to focus on this a lot so they can show the client that they are doing the work they were hired to do, but they should not be lumped into results measurement
They say that any publicity is good publicity, but as we all know in this 24/7 news-hungry world not ALLattention is good attention. The easiest thing to measure in social media is attention. You can see how many visits your page has, how many were unique and how many were repeat or new visitors. You can also easily see who referred them to your site, and perhaps even find some of your fans. Attention looks at volume and number of friends.
They say that any publicity is good publicity, but as we all know in this 24/7 news-hungry world not ALLattention is good attention. The easiest thing to measure in social media is attention. You can see how many visits your page has, how many were unique and how many were repeat or new visitors. You can also easily see who referred them to your site, and perhaps even find some of your fans. Attention looks at volume and number of friends.Comments or reactions divided by the number of posts
http://www.instituteforpr.org/topics/measuring-relationshipsThere is a way to test your relationships through a survey that was developed by By Linda Childers Hon and James E. Grunig. The survey measures in five areas to test perceptions: Trust, Satisfaction Commitment, Exchange Relationship Communal Relationship Look also at customer satisfaction surveys and peg to their involvement with social media sources, Loyalty over time, visitors that come back more than once, and Repeat visitors.You can also measure to sentiment to get a crude idea of where you stand with the community over time, mostly positive, mostly negative and mostly neutral. However, sentiment doesn’t give a full view.
Finally, the golden ring and the thing that fuels ROI are actions. In the end, how people feel about your brand, and how many people come to see your online properties and interact with you, are only important insofar as they predict how many people will DO something about it.We went over the idea of setting SMART objectives. There are very advanced analytics that can show you how many people came to the site and bought and from where. WE also had the case study earlier to show ROI for ticket sales. All of these are great ways to measure.We can’t go in depth in how to measure everything in this class, but you will go a long way to identifying HOW if you have taken the time to set up the WHAT, or your SMART Objectives.Four to Six questions for analyzing a website: http://www.4qsurvey.com (Avinash Kaushik). Based on today’s visit, how would you rate your site experience overall?2. Which of the following best describes the primary purpose of your visit?3. Were you able to complete the purpose of your visit today?4a. (If yes) What do you value most about the [sitename] website?4b. (If no) Please tell us why you were not able to fully complete the purpose of your visit today? 3 optional questions can be included: Visit Frequency, Path to Site and an email solicitation questionSeth Godin: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/11/six-questions-for-analyzing-a-website.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29What's the revenue per visit? (RPM). For every thousand visitors, how much money does the site make (in ads or sales)?What's the cost of getting a visit? Does the site use PR or online ads or affiliate deals to get traffic? If so, what's the yield?Is there a viral co-efficient? Existing visitors can lead to new visitors as a result of word of mouth or the network effect. How many new visitors does each existing user bring in? (Hint: it's less than 1. If it were more than 1, then every person on the planet would be a user soon.) This number rarely stays steady. For example, at the beginning, Twitter's co-efficient was tiny. Then it scaled to be one of the largest ever (Oprah!) and now has started to come back down to Earth.What's the cost of a visitor? Does the site need to add customer service or servers or other expenses as it scales?Are there members/users? There's a big difference between drive-by visits and registered users. Do these members pay a fee, show up more often, have something to lose by switching?What's the permission base and how is it changing? The only asset that can be reliably built and measured online is still permission. Attention is scarce, and permission is the privilege to deliver anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them. Permission is easy to measure and hard to grow.
I could also look to measure ROI. Perhaps there are a number of participants that you need to attend your conference to make it profitable. Let’s say in this case, that number would be 400 paying participants at the early bird rate. Let’s say that historically, at three months before the conference, you usually have 200 people registered, 300 at two months out and 400 in the month leading up to the conference. Perhaps you give a special discount code to the online influencers you have invited to your conference that they can give to their followers.“By two months prior to the event, over 100 people will have registered using the ‘friends of online influencer code and we will be 15 percent ahead of usual registration numbers.” Let’s say that tickets for the conference through the online influencer code is $150, if you multiply by 100 tickets, this is $15,000. To truly calculate ROI, you need to then subtract the cost for getting those ticket sales. So let’s say you spent $1,000 in staff time and outreach to get those influencers involved, so you net $14,000.
Add the cost of the event, this is still not bottom line. You could compare the cost to acquire each participant.
You need a balanced scorecard of financial and nonfinancial measures to move beyond an ROI
Here are the four traditional categories used in business. So, I thought we could look at these as an example. Remember, your categories could be entirely diffrerent dependent on your industry. SAP Community Networkhttp://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/KPI/Business+KPIsKPIs represent the most important drivers of value creation for your business
SAP Community Networkhttp://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/KPI/Business+KPIsKPIs represent the most important drivers of value creation for your business
Revenue TrackingConversion RatesRegression and CorrelationMulti-Channel AttributionAverage Lifetime ValueThe Control Case
42 RULES FOR B2B SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETINGBy Michael Procopio,Peter Spielvogel,Natascha ThomsonRule 29: Track ROI SelectivelyI don’t believe you can measure the ROI of every action in social media. You can measure specific actions. If you initiate almost any social media project, your manager will probably ask you: “What’s the ROI (Return on Investment)?” Common responses in social media circles include: “What is the ROI of the telephone or email?”“If we take ROI to mean Return on Influence…” “ROI is easy, of course you can show it.”First, ROI is a financial measure typically expressed as a percentage. Example: I bought 10 apples for $10 and I sold them for $50. ($50*10 apples)-($10*10)=$400. $400/($10*10 apples) = 4. To get to a percentage = 4*100 = 400% ROI.For many social media initiatives, both the return and costs are fuzzy. This makes things difficult from a tracking standpoint. I don’t believe you can measure the ROI of every action in social media. But you can measure certain specific actions. I * once measured a 2500% ROI for a lead generation activity with social media. The campaign team was promoting a webinar. Forty-eight hours before the webinar they asked the product manager to:Write a blog post about the webinarPut a short post on LinkedIn with a link to the blog postTweet the link to the blog postThe return was 100 “leads”, that is, 100 people signed up for the webinar. Assume a digital lead costs an average of $40, which would make the return $4,000. In this case, the product manager’s burdened cost was $150 for the one hour he spent on the project.When I told co-workers the results, they immediately challenged them:You didn’t take into account that he’s been building up his blog following over three yearsYou didn’t calculate this out for a full yearYou didn’t include all the costs of maintaining the blog Writing a blog post is part of his jobThis is why I only track ROI selectively. Like many other things, the full picture may take more time to calculate than it is worth. But if you bound the problem, it becomes manageable.The key to obtaining a credible ROI is determining the source of online clicks. For the above example we used a web tracking tool that let us create the links we used in the blog. Then all other activities pointed to the blog. Hence, we could easily report on how many readers clicked the link in the blog to register for the webinar. And how many completed the registration form. To know which channels are working best for you, create a separate tracking link for each social channel. If you don’t have a web reporting tool already set up on your web site, you can approximate by using a URL shortening service such as http://bit.ly which will provide statistics on clicks per individual URL. Unfortunately, it only tracks that a person got to a specific page, not whether they completed the form on it. But, you might be able to track this separately.You also need to design work flow into your campaign to help you track the results as people move through the sales process. One presentation I saw showed how a video was constructed with the goal of getting the viewer to request a demo. The link from the video went to a specific landing page where the viewer could request an in person demo. By tracking those leads through the sales process, the team showed an $8M dollar pipeline increase; they will eventually be able to show the revenue once the sales close. * Michael
Some referred to attribution as being like a game of ultimate FrisbeeAttribution analysis is a popular tool amongst institutional money managers seeking a way to better evaluate the investment talent of portfolio managers. Simply put, this type of analysis segments investment returns into 4 categories: Returns due to 1) style allocation, 2) sector allocation, 3) stock selection, and 4) activity.It has been adapted for social media
http://success.adobe.com/en/na/programs/digital-index/1205_18011_social_media.htmlAdobe Digital Index interviewed social media analytics experts and analyzed 1.7billion visits to the websites of more than 225 U.S. companies in the media, retail, and travel industries.First-click attribution more accurately captures the impact of social media, increasing its value by up to94 percent.Analyzed using Adobe’s Omniture Site CatalystAdobe Digital Index Report, “Why marketers aren’t giving social the credit it deserves”http://success.adobe.com/en/na/programs/digital-index/1205_18011_social_media.html
Figure 2 illustrates this comparison for retail. For all social sites, using first-click attribution resulted insignificant increases in the value of visitors, ranging from 76% to 785%. In addition to showing higher value pervisitor, using first-click attribution changed the relative ranking of these sites. For example, with last-clickattribution, Pinterest generated the second highest value per visitor. However, first-click attribution metricsshowed that Pinterest had the sixth highest value per visitor.The same analysis for travel and media websites showed that first-click attribution resulted in per visitor valuesthat ranged from 57% to 7,047% higher for travel, and 4% to 40% higher for media. (See the appendixfor details.)Analyzed using Adobe’s Omniture Site CatalystAdobe Digital Index Report, “Why marketers aren’t giving social the credit it deserves”http://success.adobe.com/en/na/programs/digital-index/1205_18011_social_media.html
As shown in Figure 3,using first-click attribution for searchresults in a value per visitor that is 38% higher than that oflast-click attribution. However, the relative gap betweensearch and social decreases from 363% to 241%.7 For traveland media websites, the relative gap between search andsocial decreased from 424% to 252% and 76% to 67%,respectively.Our analysis shows that the value of visitors in terms ofrevenue from search is higher than that of visitors from socialusing both first-click and last-click attribution. However, thisdoes not mean that the ROI from search marketing alwaysexceeds that of social. Depending on the relative costs ofinvesting in search and social channels, these smallervariances in visitor value could cause brands to shift somemarketing budget from search into social media.Analyzed using Adobe’s Omniture Site CatalystAdobe Digital Index Report, “Why marketers aren’t giving social the credit it deserves”http://success.adobe.com/en/na/programs/digital-index/1205_18011_social_media.html
Correlation assumes no cause and effect relationship between inputs and outputs. In simplified terms, it simply asks the question "when this input is big, does my output tend to be bigger (a positive correlation) smaller (a negative correlation) or does the value of the input have no effect on the output (zero correlation).http://www.designyourway.net/diverse/graphs/dygraphs.jpg
The black line in this chart is the number of legal, permanent residents in the US, the green line is overall population growth, and the red bars are notable events in history.Not surprisingly, this chart shows that in the first 50 years, immigration was closely correlated with population growth.The first red line is the California Gold RushThe second line is the Civil WarThe third line is the Immigration Act of 1882, which levied a 50 cent tax on aliens and restricted convictsTimeplot Software – Interactive Timelineshttp://www.simile-widgets.org/timeplot/
Regression analysis implicitly assumes a linear cause and effect relationship between input variables and the output and then tests to see how good that assumption is. Regression fits the data to a line (for one input) or a surface (for multiple inputs). If the R-Squared value reported is high enough (the definition of "high enough" depends on the situation), the fit was good and the linear model is a good reflection of the relationship between the inputs and output. If the R-Squared value is too low, the regression model is not an accurate reflection of the relationship between the inputs and outputs. See Also Definition of Standard "B" Coefficients.
http://www.ridiculouslyhealthy.com/living/simple-food-substitutions-use-this-not-that-for-cooking-baking/The purpose of oil in a cake is to keep apart the flour and the moisture from forming into strands of gluten which makes it all rubbery and gross (which is also why you don’t mix dry/wet ingredients until the bitter end). Applesauce does the same basic thing, however it’s not a fat like oil (obviously).Also, you can substitute plain fat free yogurt for mayonaise in recipes, who knew?
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/socialmedia/socialmedia.pdfPredicted vs. Box Office SalesUsing the rate of chatter from almost 3 million tweets from the popular site Twitter, we constructed a linear regression model for predicting box-office revenues of movies in advance of their release. We then showed that the results outperformed in accuracy those of the Hollywood Stock Exchange and that there is a strong correlation between the amount of attention a given topic has (in this case a forthcoming movie) and its ranking in the future.We also analyzed the sentiments present in tweets and demonstrated their efficacy at improving predictions after a movie has released. While in this study we focused on the problem of predicting box office revenues of movies for the sake of having a clear metric of comparison with other methods, this method can be extended to a large panoply of topics, ranging from the future rating of products to agenda setting and election.
Katie Painehttp://kdpaine.blogs.com/themeasurementstandard/2010/09/exposure-is-not-awareness.htmlHow I Assumed Exposured = Awareness, but Lived to Tell About ItA study we did almost crashed and burned, thanks to our false assumption that exposure equals awareness. Here's what happened... We conduct an annual awareness and relationship measurement study for a large national non-profit. I’d been looking forward to writing up this year’s report because we also do their traditional and social media tracking and I knew that, in terms of basic impressions, they‘d had a three-fold increase in overall exposure. All of that increase was either positive or neutral, and a majority of it mentioned the non-profit prominently. So I was convinced we were going to find a major bump in awareness.Imagine my surprise when, in fact, awareness declined. From a statistical perspective it wasn’t a significant decline—less than 2%—but enough to make every alarm go off. How could this be? How could they enjoy more exposure, and more favorable exposure than ever before, and still see awareness go down?We checked and rechecked the data. Isolated for every factor we could think of. And that’s how we finally figured it out. Our awareness study used a statistically valid sample of the entire U.S. population, but our client is geared entirely towards active members of the U.S. military and their families. As it happens, only about 40% of our study respondents had some connection to the military. So we redid our analysis, looking at only those respondents who acknowledged a tie to the military.Ah ha!Awareness went up, relationship scores went up, and willingness to volunteer or donate went up. In other words, our client had done a terrific job reaching their target audience. But we had assumed that exposure would mean awareness for the entire national audience. And we were very much mistaken. Awareness had gone up—but only among people who had a reason to support the organization.
The Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) – a public corporation created through an agreement between state and local governments – assists and helps grow thousands of Michigan businesses each year.Facebook fans had a high likelihood of traveling in Michigan. Even out-of-state fans had a higher likelihood to travel to Michigan after engaging withPure Michigan’s social media.Custom questions showed that the website and word of mouth were main drivers of visits to the social media presence. In addition, they found outthat 71% of survey respondents were made more aware of places and activities in Michigan through the Facebook page.
From Avinash Kaushikhttp://www.kaushik.net/avinash/analytics-tip-calculate-ltv-customer-lifetime-value/You can use this as a blunt instrument, or you can look for your most valuable customers.My most valuable customers last year bought 4 times compared to an average of 2. They tended to spend 40% more than average per order. However, they might cost significantly more to acquire.
Score = Interpret markers, this is a influence proxySay = Looking at topics and behaviorSee = Watching what people actually do, and how others behave in community
The ability to look at relationships by topic is coming, there are already lists that you can buy by topic through Tracckr, and Klout and others try hard through Topics.
Tell my story about Meltwater NewsLead Cultivation and Growth Marrying Structured and Unstructured DataTopical Relationship Mining
http://www.spiral16.com/blog/2012/09/using-social-media-monitoring-to-generate-leads-part-two/Our goal as a social media research company is to identify strategic partners. We want to find companies that specialize in social media research and help them find better data and insight. By using a set of five keywords and a number of specific exclusions, we can find agencies and/or consulting firms who fit the bill. When we make contact, we also have a built-in story about how we found them — using our own platform!
http://leadconfidential.com/rapleaf-social-media-data-lead-generators/Not unlike other data providers, RapLeaf charges on a query volume basis, and companies can access the data by sending over files or in real-time through their API.
http://leadconfidential.com/rapleaf-social-media-data-lead-generators/Not unlike other data providers, RapLeaf charges on a query volume basis, and companies can access the data by sending over files or in real-time through their API.
Consider how Anas Younes, a doctor at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, harnessed the power of his fans. Younes specializes in lymphoma and needed more patients to enroll in his clinical trials. For 18 months, he used Twitter and Facebook to share important information about cancer studies and trials, focusing on lymphoma. He amassed a modest but respectable community of 617 (1,189 – 10/2012) followers on his Facebook fan page and 1,511 (6,231 10/2012) on Twitter — not bad for a busy doctor, but probably not successful from purely a popularity standpoint.The key was that his fans were highly motivated by his topic. If someone has lymphoma, Younes is a “go-to” guy. He has built strong thought leadership on Facebook, Twitter and through MD Anderson’s Cancerwise blog, and he curates the topic well. As a result, Younes has had a lot of people e-mail him with questions about the disease. More importantly, they are signing up for and referring friends to his clinical trial program. According to Younes, he has quadrupled the number of patients in his clinical trials using social media channels. For a busy doctor who relies on robust participation to further his career, this metric is much more important than the number of Facebook fans he has. Younes has the right fans, who are taking action to benefit his bottom line as a research doctor at a prestigious hospital.Time Flies: Looking Back at a Year of Using Social Media, Dr. http://www2.mdanderson.org/cancerwise/2010/08/looking-back-at-a-year-of-using-social-media.html Cancerwise Blog, MD Anderson, http://www2.mdanderson.org/cancerwise/
Channel Success
Some Breakout detailTechcrunch provided 35% of pageviews and 29% of user registrations. Fewer than 15% of registered users set up a basic campaign, 4% returned again, only 2 people requested pricing and upgrade.Mashable provided 22% (direct) pageviews and 14% registrations.Marketing Bloggers: Three influential bloggers provided about 15% of pageviews and 8% registrations that led to 11 active sales cycles and negotiations and price quote requests. 19 of their readers took the time to write reviews.Techmeme brought in potential partners who wanted to integrate or use the service in their own offerings.The press release drove 4-7% of pageviews, with negligible user registrations.
Case Study Story, as told by Mikund:http://www.techipedia.com/2011/buzz/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+techipedia+%28Techipedia%3A+Tamar+Weinberg+on+Social+Media+Marketing+Strategy%29In 2009, Brian Solis, online PR pioneer and author, and Mukund Mohan, currently the CEO of Jivity, founded BuzzGain, a DIY Public Relations software company, which was sold to Meltwater in 2010.
Image From:http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/keyword-funnel-tracking-google-analytics/Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design,Development & Social Media.
http://www.mdgadvertising.com/blog/infographic-the-roi-of-social-media-2/You can see (in Gray, that 80% of companies surveyed are using social media to recruit new talent)
Clearswift chief operating officer Andrew Wyatt.2010 Study (UK) http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/1834741/social-networking-critical-employee-satisfaction#ixzz285jJQO8j Eight out of 10 employees claim that being trusted to manage their own time and the internet as they wish is more important than pay.Additionally, a fifth (21 per cent) of employees would turn down a job if it did not allow them access to social networking sites or personal email during work time, according to a survey carried out by softwarehttp://www.clearswift.com/news/press-releases/worldwide-clampdown-on-technology-as-businesses-overreact-to-high-profile-data-breaches(2011 Study) If social media were the employee backlash would be significant: 26% would become demotivated, 14% would work around the policy and 3% would consider leaving.
http://linkhumans.com/blog/how-a-company-used-linkedin-and-social-media-to-recruitby Laurent BrouatCH2M HILL is a global leader in full-service engineering, construction, and operations. With 25K employeesEnglewood, Colo.Results1) 98% of hires in the US are directly sourced2) 95% of all hires outside of the US are also the result of direct recruitment activities3) they reduced significantly the cost and time to hire4) it is one of the only construction company to be among the 100 best companies to work for
Be choosyBe consistent
Turn on eCommerceAssign valuesDefine Goals for WebsitePurchase tools
42 RULES FOR B2B SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETINGBy Michael Procopio,Peter Spielvogel,Natascha ThomsonRule 29: Track ROI SelectivelyI don’t believe you can measure the ROI of every action in social media. You can measure specific actions. If you initiate almost any social media project, your manager will probably ask you: “What’s the ROI (Return on Investment)?” Common responses in social media circles include: “What is the ROI of the telephone or email?”“If we take ROI to mean Return on Influence…” “ROI is easy, of course you can show it.”First, ROI is a financial measure typically expressed as a percentage. Example: I bought 10 apples for $10 and I sold them for $50. ($50*10 apples)-($10*10)=$400. $400/($10*10 apples) = 4. To get to a percentage = 4*100 = 400% ROI.For many social media initiatives, both the return and costs are fuzzy. This makes things difficult from a tracking standpoint. I don’t believe you can measure the ROI of every action in social media. But you can measure certain specific actions. I * once measured a 2500% ROI for a lead generation activity with social media. The campaign team was promoting a webinar. Forty-eight hours before the webinar they asked the product manager to:Write a blog post about the webinarPut a short post on LinkedIn with a link to the blog postTweet the link to the blog postThe return was 100 “leads”, that is, 100 people signed up for the webinar. Assume a digital lead costs an average of $40, which would make the return $4,000. In this case, the product manager’s burdened cost was $150 for the one hour he spent on the project.When I told co-workers the results, they immediately challenged them:You didn’t take into account that he’s been building up his blog following over three yearsYou didn’t calculate this out for a full yearYou didn’t include all the costs of maintaining the blog Writing a blog post is part of his jobThis is why I only track ROI selectively. Like many other things, the full picture may take more time to calculate than it is worth. But if you bound the problem, it becomes manageable.The key to obtaining a credible ROI is determining the source of online clicks. For the above example we used a web tracking tool that let us create the links we used in the blog. Then all other activities pointed to the blog. Hence, we could easily report on how many readers clicked the link in the blog to register for the webinar. And how many completed the registration form. To know which channels are working best for you, create a separate tracking link for each social channel. If you don’t have a web reporting tool already set up on your web site, you can approximate by using a URL shortening service such as http://bit.ly which will provide statistics on clicks per individual URL. Unfortunately, it only tracks that a person got to a specific page, not whether they completed the form on it. But, you might be able to track this separately.You also need to design work flow into your campaign to help you track the results as people move through the sales process. One presentation I saw showed how a video was constructed with the goal of getting the viewer to request a demo. The link from the video went to a specific landing page where the viewer could request an in person demo. By tracking those leads through the sales process, the team showed an $8M dollar pipeline increase; they will eventually be able to show the revenue once the sales close. * Michael