Social Marketing Strategies Metrics, Where Are They?

The inter­est­ing part of this ses­sion was the quasi-total lack of dis­cus­sion about met­rics for social media. My read is that it’s not the panelist’s fault, it’s just the cur­rent state of social media. Also, much of social media can­not be mea­sured quan­ti­tavely, but rather qual­i­ta­tively based on your busi­ness objec­tives. Note: see also the update towards the bot­tom of this blog post.

Live blog­ging the Social Media Met­rics panel at SXSW.

Pan­elists

Tom Parish CEO Tom Parish Inc

Brian Magierski Chief Dev Officer BSG Alliance Corporation

Michael Smith Exec Dir USAA

Ynema Mangum Exec Producer BMC Software Inc

Rohit Bhargava SVP, Digital Marketing Ogilvy

Panel Presentation and Discussion

- Why are CMO’s afraid of social media and social net­work­ing?

Rohit: There may be two rea­sons, the first being “loss of con­trol”, the other being the mea­sure­ment ques­tion. Man­agers have a hard time mov­ing from impres­sions to engage­ment. Would you rather have a mil­lion impres­sions that no one paid atten­tion to or get­ting the “right 10,000 peo­ple”.

Michael: Each senior officer has a map of risks in their mind regarding social media. The CMO is worried about a brand out of control. The Senior HR person is worried about losing people. For the PR guy, social media is either largest friend or foe. If it goes out of control, it's a foe. The Sales exec won't care if it has no impact on sales. The CEO looks at it this way: "If we don't do anything, will it come back to hurt me."

Brian: The old paradigm was about controlling the message. The new one is about openness, and this is the way that companies will compete in the future. But the problem is, if companies do it now, they will probably have a bad experience. This is because companies are delivering a poor customer experience, and the CXO's know it.

- How can com­pa­nies lever­age social media for mar­ket­ing suc­cess when they have no experience?

Ynema: The pri­or­ity is to get the exec­u­tive involved in social media; it’s not enough they’re excited about it, they actu­ally have to do it. But when senor execs do get involved, it’s a good lever to use to build com­mu­nity.

- Is it impor­tant to self-assess your readi­ness for social media?

Brian: Com­pa­nies can’t jump straight into social media and have any cred­i­bil­ity, they need to take a phased approach. The first step is lis­ten­ing, the sec­ond step is engag­ing, the third one is cre­at­ing a plat­form for thei cus­tomers to social­ize on.

Ynema: You have to be con­fi­dent about your prod­uct or ser­vice before div­ing into con­ver­sa­tion mar­ket­ing.

- What met­rics do you use to eval­u­ate the progress of social media pro­grams?

Michael: For PR firms, you can have met­rics. For exam­ple, blog met­rics, com­mu­nity par­tic­i­pa­tion met­rics, and met­rics that artic­u­late the value you get from dif­fer­ent chan­nels, like from email. It turns out that com­mu­nity man­age­ment yielded the best met­rics, because of the close engage­ment and con­ver­sa­tions on social media platfroms.

Rohit: It’s not the lack of abil­ity of mea­sur­ing things, it’s know­ing the value of things that can be measured.

Tom: There’s are obvi­ous dif­fer­ences between BtoC and BtoB sales, and the longer the life­cy­cle, the harded it is to iden­tify the fac­tors that led to the sale. Maybe the cus­tomer based a deci­sion after months of read­ing a blog, but it would be hard to know this.

*Update: this Meebo chat transcript of the panel highlights the problems of this session:

16:26 439761 Once again, great panel goes off the rails with no dis­cern­able direc­tion or abil­ity to stick to a TOPIC

16:27 WillElliott4 Who wrote these “questions”??!!???

16:27 guest439761 I would love to try an exper­i­ment — lets col­lab­o­rate, do some research, make a wiki — and ANSWER THE QUESTION ABOUT METRICS

16:29 guest690201 is now known as met­rics are not as dry as this panel is

16:29 met­rics are not as dry as this panel is rev­olu­cion!

16:31 strate­gi­cast for some rea­son tha panel believes that say­ing the word” met­rics” a lot answers the question.

16:35 chris­tine but
it would be bet­ter to have the panel be actu­ally about met­rics, since
in the­ory that’s what peo­ple came here for. this is a panel on ‘how to
think about sell­ing a social media pro­gram into a big company’

16:40 mvp i think we should all just ran­domly start shout­ing “metrics”

16:45 Michael­BassikIsCool­erThanYou is now known as OpeningMyWristsNow

16:50 guest3411256 i won­der if some­one has been doing met­rics on the num­ber of peo­ple leaving

16:50 emp­ty­wells Bar­tender, Met­rics Please?

16:50 thFOOL I’d like a Vodka and metrics

16:53 Open­ingMy­Wrist­sNow GENIUS:
its not the ROI of a press release. who mea­sures a press release?! it’s
the @#*&^$ story that results FROM THE PRESS RELEASE

16:56 this­pan­elis­bunk the
thing is we’re pro­fes­sion­als, who paid money to learn real things, and
they know the infor­ma­tion and aren’t reveal­ing their strategies.