Page 181 - Social Media Marketing

practices (causation) that you can replicate to grow your business. Figure€6.7 shows
the relationship between social analytics, web analytics, and the starting point of your
business analytics, shown here with their related commerce pipeline metrics.

2 Web Analytics

AWARENESS CONSIDERATION PURCHASE 1 Social Media Listening

3 Pipeline Metrics and Business Analytics 159

Figure€6.7╇â•B‰ usiness Analytics ■ ╇ B usiness A nalytics

Initially, these techniques may be limited to marketing and your use of the
Social Web as a marketing platform, as is often the case with social media marketing
programs designed to create additional outreach points or places where people within
your organization can participate with customers on behalf of the brand. The next
section—where the focus turns to business analytics—takes the techniques that are
useful in marketing and applies them to the business as a whole. In particular, in the
case of social media and the Social Web, there is a measurable connection to business,
expressed through a result against a set of established business objectives. That level
of understanding needs to be the end goal, and you need to be relentless about getting
there.

It’s All About Business

In social business applications, the connection to the business itself is an order of magni-
tude more fundamental. In the simplest sense, it is Operations more than Marketing that
drive the conversations: Therefore, it is the way in which the business is managed that
becomes the focus, as opposed to how well the business is marketed. In true social busi-
ness applications, the social processes and the software or technology that supports them
are more likely to be paid for by the operations or information systems budgets than they
are by the marketing department. The marketing department, by comparison, may pay
for the programs associated with talking about the ways in which customers are benefit-
ing from the implementation of a social business program, or in building the outreach or
listening platforms that drive them.

Looking at social business technology and software as a business infrastruc-
ture expense rather than as a marketing expense makes clear the ways in which the