Social media ROI - sharing our experiences
November 19th, 2008 by Lloyd Gofton
Three months ago I wrote a post about the importance of standing fast and explaining the reasons that we cannot always provide traditional measurements, such as ROI, as part of a social media campaign when questioned by our clients and peers. I still stand by this.
On Monday, Todd Defren wrote an excellent post, titled: ROI for social media marketing: it’s complicated, which summed up many theories and quotes from around the community, and has since received comments from even more influencers - great job Todd!
Reading Todd’s post, and looking back at Liberate Media’s own experiences, I thought it would be useful to share our thinking and progress, which has informed our position on the subject.
First of all, in reference to the big question of ROI for social media - Todd hit the nail on the head, it is complicated! In a traditional sense of: a rate of return used to evaluate the efficiency of a financial investment, ROI is specifically complicated by trying to apply numeric quantities to human interactions and conversations - as highlighted by Jason Falls.
So we fight the good fight and educate our clients - right? Right. But when speaking to metrics-dominated sectors such as retail and travel, as we have been recently, education is one thing, but in a harsh economic climate clients are far more likely to be swayed when they are told what they want to hear; that they can spend X on social media marketing and get X back.
Now don’t get me wrong, i’m not advocating that we just tell clients what they want to hear because the economy is tough, or in fact that we lost out on those clients as they went for alternative providers, neither are true. But, what I am saying is that while there are so many differing opinions on the subject, and therefore options, educating our clients on the issue is made even tougher.
This was a point of frustration, but over the same time period we’ve been busy continuing to develop our own metrics and frameworks to help clients to measure the tangible elements, while also communicating and evidencing that social media contains many points of human interaction that require a different approach.
As we developed our frameworks, and looked at the options of how social media relates to search marketing and other elements of the digital marketing mix, it became clear that as social media influences the function of digital marketing as a whole, the metrics that we use don’t need to be reflected through a single metric or score, so why make it so?
Furthermore, as has been mentioned previously on this blog and on many others, each campaign is unique, so a static metric framework, while undoubtedly useful, does not tell the whole story. In reality, the measurement points need to relate to core business objectives which will change from campaign to campaign.
This leaves us with an assortment of measurement points, including traditional metrics, all of which are useful, but need to be presented with a large dose of translation from the consultants involved, not by a single metric. So why try to distill the information down to a score when the power is in the detail?
I hope this brief overview has been a useful exercise, and helped in some way to move the conversation on, if not for many of the afore mentioned bloggers as they’ve undoubtedly considered this already, but from an education point of view.
The development of our own framework continues on an almost daily basis, different campaigns add new angles and considerations, and we will share more thinking as we continue to build.
Let me know your thoughts.
Tags: measurement, PR, roi, social media ROI