Social Media Marketing ROI Poll
Nov.13, 2008 in
Community, Planning, ROI, Social Media
There has been a lot of recent discussion on how we measure the ROI of social media marketing. Jason Falls wrote provocatively that ‘you don’t get money out of a conversation‘. While I don’t disagree in principal, I do believe that marketing must be accountable for its programs (I am sure Jason thinks that way too). At yesterday’s Social Media Breakfast in Boston, Brian Halligan and Matt Cutler each spoke very clearly about how they were measuring the success of their social media programs, while Andrew McAfee spoke more of the issues that surround accuracy of measuring return.
So it is your turn. What do you think? Is there an accurate ROI on social media marketing? What is the leading issue?
/Colin
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November 13th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
I don’t believe that there will be a direct way to measure the influence of Social Media marketing. Although tools are being developed to listen to the conversations had, are those conversations being lead to dollars? However, I don’t believe Marketing and Advertising can ever truly be measured. You know a billboard in time square works because it has been tried and tested, and you KNOW people are looking at it. Social Media isn’t old enough yet to be truly tried in tested in order for companies to just trust that it works. But we need to keep on testing and re-testing to prove it out.
November 13th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
ROI only makes sense with initiatives we understand. Aside with the usual ROI issues, may marketers are quite ineffective at employing new media. They’d do better to create defined (test) programs with a fixed small budget and grow these.
November 13th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
Interesting…. I think it needs to be clear that we can measure ROI by the numbers of leads coming out of social media (which is a logical thing to do) but I question whether that really reflects the benefits/value of using social media and more conversational approaches with customers across their lifecycle…which is almost impossible to do but I think a lot of the payoff of engagement and transparency comes from customers who are happier over the long term and less likely to go away.
November 17th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Interesting that nearly 50% of poll respondents feel that the leading issue (or deterrent) behind social media ROI is immature measurement tools and applications, when only 7% of companies elected to measure its impact on their brand in 2007. While it may be difficult to measure if a message board post converted to a sale or resulted in defection from a site, the ability to understand key metrics such as tonality, velocity, volume, and intent is business changing. How does your share of voice compare to your share of market? How does the positive or negative sentiment stack-up against the competitive landscape. What kind of information are our customers and prospects seeking that we may not be providing? What kind of social media tools could/should we be leveraging to understand the voice-of-customer? The wealth of insights that can be gleaned through effective and comprehensive social media impact analysis is again, ‘business changing’.