I recently attended a presentation by Sean O’Driscoll, CEO of Ants Eye View on how to measure social media engagement. He gave the audience an in-depth look at the various stages a company must go through to truly embrace and ultimately measure social media and its impact on their business. He described the process of implementing and measuring social media as a “journey” whose destination is to become a fully-engaged enterprise that creates a measurable impact on brand health and business through customer engagement.
The journey begins with an understanding and acceptance that to compete in today’s marketplace, a company should invest in building long-term relationships with their consumers.
There are several key factors that support this conclusion.
• Technology has lowered the barrier to competitive entry, and competition is more intense than ever.
• Consumer trust has shifted dramatically away from corporate America, and has been replaced by a heavy reliance on peers, friends and even strangers online.
• The adoption of digital tools and social technologies has changed expectations in consumers’ minds – they now expect engagement and service in real-time.
• Consistently engaging your customers requires marketers to be in the places where they are, not necessarily where you want them to be.
The journey for an enterprise to become fully engaged in social media typically has five stages.
Stage 1 can be described as Traditional, where a company is focused on traditional marketing tactics and is ambivalent to online conversations about their brand. Surprisingly, there are still many companies at this stage; where social media is not even on the executive’s radar.
Stage 2 is described by Sean as Dabbling in Silos, where socially active mavericks within an organization begin to monitor conversations but there are no formal teams in place. At this stage, the customer data they gather is not connected with business goals.
At Stage 3, the company begins to Operationalize their social media effort through an empowered team run by a proven leader. Listening to their customers begins to generate implications and provide a baseline for metrics, and the company begins to explore tools to consolidate the data.
Real Results begin to surface in Stage 4 when channels start to yield impactful results and systems and tools are optimized. At this stage, employees in all departments are actively engaged and competent, and company executives are invested in analytics.
Stage 5 is where a company is a Fully Engaged Enterprise in social media and the effect on business outcomes and the organization are substantial and measurable. Business outcomes include the ability to bring products and services to market with built-in demand, manage risk better, and result in more efficient research, development, marketing and support operations.
At this stage, the organization sees increased revenue and loyalty, and customer engagement is a part of the company DNA. Importantly, the entire employee base has a 360 view of the customer and can anticipate their needs. Sean cited Starbucks as an example of a company that has reached Stage 5 through their use of social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and how they listen and respond to customers through their My Starbucks Idea site.
The measurement journey also moves through stages and is the hardest part of the social media equation.
The four stages of measurement move from merely gathering data to using that data to evaluate brand health and business impact. The goal is to show the connection between online customer engagement and business value, but measurement requires programs that are scaled, predictable and resourced.
Sean identified four approaches for measuring social engagement – measuring behavior, monitoring claimed behavior, testing alternatives, and data mining.
Behavioral tactics examples include using coupon codes specific to social media channels (Dell Outlet), social media URLs to build online communities coded into web reporting suites with embedded upsell/cross-sell ads (Intuit). This tactic works because it records actual product adoption, but doesn’t work when social media is “part” of the purchase process but not the last step. Sean cited Amazon reviews as an example of people using social media for peer reviews, but then completing their actual purchase on alternate sites.
Monitoring Claimed behavior via customer panel research is a long-used method that provides some measure of the social media impact on brand health and business impact, but is always subject to skepticism because it is based on what people say they do without knowing if they have actually done what they say. Despite this obvious drawback, monitoring Claimed behavior can still be useful when other data is not available, and when measured over time to discern trends and consistency of response.
Two Testing tactics cited by Sean were A/B testing of specific websites with alternative engagement functionality or testing Twitter messages for reach, click-thru and conversion. Testing alternatives provide a concrete comparison, but doesn’t work when sample sizes and data sets are too small to be reliable, or when you don’t have the time and resources.
Data mining on criteria such as matching community profile data to customer sales data and comparing to non-community customer sales or cross-tabbing verbatim comments with customer satisfaction measures are proven tactics for measuring success. However, the accuracy of the data and large data sets are prerequisites, and specialized expertise is required. Based on that, Sean felt Data mining was the most difficult tactic for most companies.
In response to audience questions, Sean felt that Claimed measurement was probably the most beneficial for smaller companies with limited resources.
All in all, this session was a good overview of the social media landscape and will provide a good basis for discussion with my clients who say "I think social media may be important but can it really impact my business".
Where are your clients on the social media journey?
