Page 202 - Social Media Marketing

c h a p t e r 7: ╇ F ive E ssential T ips╇ ■Link Social Analytics with Business Analytics

Given the direct measurement of activity in and around social channels, it’s also impor-
tant to link this with your existing business analytics to create an understanding of
how social, web, and business analytics fit together. Far from isolated, the social ana-
lytics both drive and are driven by what happens at the intersection of your business
and the output side of the purchase funnel. Comments, ratings, recommendations, blog
posts, and videos tend to reflect what happened when a brand, product, or service was
put to the test more than they reflect what was promised in the advertising or other
promotion that helped drive purchase, although commentary to that effect is often
present. These comments, ratings, and recommendations are valuable when creating
and refining a social business strategy: They can be tracked and used as guides when
developing a response to a negative event, for example.

Beyond using social media for outreach or promotion—for example, in creating
a brand outpost or using a channel like Twitter to convey sales information or collect
180 customer comments—the Social Web can be used as a part of a real-time feedback
system that keeps you firm or organization on track. You do it; they talk about it. You
do it a different way, and they talk about it in a different way. This basic feedback loop
sets up a strong measurement and testing application that you can use to build your
business.

As a starting point, consider the Net Promoter Score. Created by Fred Reichheld
at Bain Consulting, the Net Promoter Score is straightforward, well-documented (a
benefit to you when presenting social technology and gaining internal support for its
use) and easy to apply. Built around a 0-10 scale and the single question, “How likely
are you to recommend my brand, product, or service?” the Net Promoter Score nicely
captures in a single metric what underlies the majority of the significant connections
between the Social Web and your brand, product, or service.

How can the Net Promoter (NPS) methodology help you? Consider the
application of NPS by Austin-based B2B technical and lab furniture manufacturer
Formaspace. Implemented in earnest in 2009, NPS provided a whole-business market-
place view that was fully auditable. It was implemented at the C-level and is now fol-
lowed by every department at Formaspace.

I spoke with Formaspace CEO Jeff Turk about the implementation of the Net
Promoter Score. Jeff described the effort like this:

“We don’t really look at NPS in terms of expecting a single “great leap
forward.” We had a formal and frequently measured quality assurance and
customer satisfaction system long before implementing NPS. We also know
our most vocal customers quite well, so we had a very good idea what they
would have to say about us before implementing NPS. We look at NPS as a
source of continual incremental improvements.
“The NPS system gives us a lot of small bits of feedback that incrementally