Page 167 - Social Media Marketing

platform—is not fundamentally a marketing channel. Rather, it is more of a forum or 145
place for conversations, some of which may be of interest to you as they impact your
brand, product or service. This creates the opportunity to talk, participate, and gain ■ SOCI A L A NA LY T ICS
influence that can be helpful in marketing and more general business applications.
Measurement forms the basis for quantifying this work.

The Need to Measure More

The significance of the lack of a formal measurement mindset around social media
becomes clear when you consider that too many professionals using social media in
business do not measure its effectiveness. A 2009 eMarketer study found that 16 per-
cent of the professionals it surveyed measured the effectiveness of their social media
programs. The other 84 percent? It’s unclear why they are even doing the work they
are doing, and likely less clear to their CFO that they should be doing it at all. Without
a measurement program, social media marketing and its application to business is at
best an experiment; at worst, it’s a costly diversion.

If this sounds harsh, consider that nearly any business or organizational effort
undertaken represents an opportunity forgone someplace else within that same busi-
ness or organization. Every choice in business has an economic component and an
associated opportunity (and time) cost. Failing to associate some sort of realistic, rel-
evant metric with an economic business decision is a path to suboptimal performance.

Webtrends for Facebook

Facebook provides a comprehensive analytics package that offers an excellent starting point for
understanding the performance of your Facebook business page. Webtrends builds on that, add-
ing additional capabilities and metrics not available through the basic Facebook tools. For more
information, visit Webtrends:

http://www.webtrends.com/Products/Analytics/Facebook.aspx

In a Bazaarvoice study on measurement and expectations of social media, the
majority of those businesses studied found that across a range of social channels and
applications the CMOs either didn’t know what they were getting from their social
media marketing program, or had actually concluded that there was no ROI (mean-
ing positive economic contribution to the business) associated with social media. The
one clear exception to this near-universal lack of measurement and understanding?
Ratings and reviews, which are the focus of the Bazaarvoice social commerce plat-
form. Compared with programs launched on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, rat-
ings and reviews (followed by a variety of implementations of brand platforms and
corporate blogs) stood out as being expected to make a positive contribution to the
business, and in many cases from a sales perspective. By comparison, and illustrating