Article Review-“Can You Measure the ROI of Your Social Media Campaign”
Social media, where consumers communicate with each other across various platforms as diverse as discussion forums, blogs, wikis, social networks, and video-,phone-,and news-sharping sites, has witnessed explosive growth in recent years. The rapid growth in social media is beginning to have a significant impact on consumers’ purchase behavior. Meanwhile, the marketing spend in this area remains relatively low.
However, when the marketers try to launch social media campaign for their products, they are always been challenged from CEO about how do you measure the performance of social media? How to qualify the return of investment? It is awesome that the article places the new approach to turn the traditional ROI approach which only emphasize on their own marketing investments and calculating the returns in terms of customer response. The new approach suggests the marketers should begin by considering consumer motivations to use the social media and then measure the social media investments consumer makes as they engage with the marketers’ brands.
The table in this article organized the various social metrics for social media by classifying them according to social media applications and social media performance objectives. It should give marketers a useful starting point for measuring the effectiveness of social media efforts because all of the metrics listed are easily measured.
Take social networking for example, when I interviewed my friend who worked as a marketing manager in Software Company for 5 years in China. She told me they would first created a profile at least two online communities, such as Weibo.com (The biggest Chinese local social networking), MySpace or LinkedIn. Then begin engaging with “friends” in these networks to understand the mass appeal. And notice how brands engage with users in these communities. Next, they combine the knowledge of social media with their organization strategy by considering about the questions like do they really have control over their brand? Or are they creating a sandbox in which consumer can play?” before they set the clear objectives for their social media strategy. However, it was hard for her to qualify the return or benefit for her social media strategy. When she submitted her proposal to the headcounter, she was asked to provide the ROI for this social media campaigns. The top management wanted to know what would be the benefits and potential risks to shift from traditional way to a new fields that they didn’t have any experience. They also concerned about the difficulty of number calculation from Weibo.com. The BRAND ENGAGEMENT in this table would provide her a clear idea about how to qualify the brand engagement performance. Go through the comments every day and figure out the active users; calculate number of “Likes” on friends’ feeds and the rate of activity. She could just follow the criteria given by the article and make further research based on the data collected. She could also use the BRAND AWARENESS to compare their own brand with the competitors by calculating the number of members/fans in their competitors’ Facebook profile, number of installs of applications. By comparing the brand awareness, she would easily track competitors’ marketing events and take reaction based on consumer’s feedback on Weobo.com.
However, several specific characteristics should be highlighted in China’s social media industry. First of all, the content posted in social media would be supervised. Some words or videos will be filtered or blocked. The data collected from social media may not be as accurate as the marketers expected. So what the marketers should know how to do data mining via different social media to get the accurate information. Secondly, social media could be as a strong power to attack your brand. Before the marketers launch the social media campaign, they should also consider the potential risks and the solution for the risks. For example, what would you do if lots of complains for your service or products? What is your action plan if you receive a lot of attacks from “someone” maybe your competitors? You need also take the possible loss into account for your social media campaign.
From my point of view, the article really provides the marketers new perspective to evaluate the social media performance from a more rational way.