Business in dialogue

Emarketer came out with a report of what metrics CMO’s worldwide used in 2010 and will use in 2011 to measure the value of social media marketing activities. Not surprisingly, ‘site traffic’ is still the most important measure for social marketing success in 2011, followed by ‘conversion’. When going through the list you see that the success is more and more being measured in terms of interaction, conversion and revenue. Also we are almost up to that point were every CMO uses some kind of metric to keep track of its online success.

When going over the different metrics, there are some important results that are possibly overlooked by the CMO’s. When talking about social media, I think about the conversation with en between your customers. Sure, a conversation can lead to more visitors on your site, number of contributors or number of fans.  But aren’t we overlooking something. The point of having a conversation is to have a better understanding of your customer. What is on their mind? Can you help them with it? So it mainly comes down to listening. USAF Blog created a social media triage that can be used as a basic hand guide on how to respond to your customer (after listening to them). The triage shows that it is possible to add value to a positive message that you receive. Shouldn’t this be a metric? Because here is where the marketer can really make a difference.

But don’t feel too proud about yourself after receiving positive feedback just yet. A study of Morel (2000) showed that of every 100 customers that bought your product, 33 of them are dissatisfied, of whom 10 will complain which leads to satisfaction in 6 cases. I don’t believe this study takes into account that social media takes away many of the barriers to complaint, but it still shows that in general you know only 4 of the 27 (out of a 100) customers which are dissatisfied. Now, social media seems to be the answer to it. And I think that companies such as Get Satisfaction would agree. They build online communities that enable productive conversations between companies and their customers. So why is there no metric for measuring successfully resolving customers issues and complaints. You’re not only working on customer satisfaction but also on the image of your brand and your service. Isn’t that much more valuable to a CMO than the amount of people that visit your website? Maybe these metrics are already used and mentioned in the ‘other’ category, but let’s hope that this category will be a bit bigger next year!

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