Page 183 - Social Media Marketing

and for other types of organizations. The remaining aspect of measurement and met- 161
rics is, therefore, to identify the key business analytics that can be shared across the
organization and used to guide the overall processes driving continuous improvement ■ BUSI N ESS A NA LY T ICS
in your products or services.

Mind What You Measure

Dachis Group principal Kate Niederhoffer offers her perspective on what to measure and why in
the following post. You can follow Kate on Twitter (@katenieder) as well.

http://www.dachisgroup.com/2009/11/three-masquerades-of-metrics/

Sources of Business Analytics

Business analytics can be pulled from a variety of places within the organization. The
following sections cover two of the more immediately useful sources of business ana-
lytics when setting out to create a social business program. These areas are commerce
analytics—after all, at the end of the day we generally are in business to sell something
(even in some abstract manner)—along with measures of acceptance or rejection. The
latter is particularly important as a class of metrics because it is very often a near-
direct measure of what underlies the conversations observed on the Social Web, in sup-
port forums, ideation platforms, and traditional CRM systems. Between these two, a
significant portion of what defines and drives a social business program can be found.
This makes these ideal starting points.

Commerce and pipeline analytics are an obvious first choice. To the extent that
one can directly tie social media analytics and (where applicable) web analytics to
sales, for example, a very tight reporting loop is established. In these cases, it is very
likely that the study of correlation and causation—identifying the specific relationships
between various measurements and the economic performance of the business—will
yield a fundamental set of metrics that can be used to guide the business vis a vis social
media analytics.

What about nonbusiness applications of social business or its use by organiza-
tions where the direct connects are less obvious? This is where the studies of correla-
tion and causation, combined with your own domain expertise around the processes
that drive your organization, are valuable. You can employ correlation, for example,
to literally find or discover useful quantitative measurements, and to then press deeper
into the understanding of why these particular observations are correlated. Not only is
this directly useful, you can often find new business fundamentals—especially as they
relate to the emerging marketplace defined by the Social Web—that will help ensure
that you achieve your business or organizational objectives.