Page 182 - Social Media Marketing

c h a p t e r 6 : ╇ S ocial A nalytics , M etrics , and M easurement╇ ■analytics are required to roll up. Social media analytics, web analytics, and influencer
assessments must all be viewed in the context of their relationship to fundamental busi-
ness analytics because they are the metrics that matter to the owners of the budgets
and cost centers that are more likely than not going to be paying for the cost of imple-
menting a social business program. Business analytics joins with social, influencer, and
web analytics on two fronts:

• Business analytics, especially as related to commerce applications, provides an
additional set of metrics that can be used in the overall effort to document suc-
cess and provide insights for improvement.

• Business analytics provide the stepping-off point into Social CRM.

Because business analytics relate to the actual business operation, connecting
business analytics to social and web analytics provides an end-to-end picture of the
customer experience—manifesting itself as conversations on the Social Web—with the
internal business processes that created the conversations.
160 Closest to web analytics are the business metrics associated with your online
commerce pipeline (assuming you have one). For businesses that do some part or all of
their business online (“pure online plays”), the commerce pipeline offers a number of
measurement points. Social commerce platforms from firms like Bazaarvoice excel in
not only improving close rates, increasing checkout value and the cross-selling of related
products, but also in providing continuous, real-time quantitative feedback you can use
to guide and evolve your business offering.

Offline and Nonbusiness Processes

For businesses that do not have a specific online commerce process—for example,
for a cause that is collecting signatures or a business-to-business pre-sales funnel—
the thought process and the approach to business analytics is still largely the same:
The commerce pipeline is simply replaced with the defined conversion process. Tools
like Google Analytics offer well-developed conversion analysis support that you can
use to refine your online programs in the same ways you would any other commerce
process. The connection is this: The objective is to pull together your various sources
of data that supports measurement against KPIs along with the business process met-
rics around your established business metrics. This can be tied back to what you are
observing on the Social Web. This basic metrics-driven methodology is what closes the
feedback loop that the Social Web sets in place: It is this basic feedback loop that will
drive a social business.

The feedback loop defined in the basic relationship between the purchase funnel
and conversations that impact conversion is the connection between the operation of
the business and its marketing effectiveness. This is equally true—though specific met-
rics may change—for commerce applications, for nonprofits and cause-related groups,