This is the second part of a three-part series on social media evaluation tools and techniques. You can read the first part here.
Social media is about branding: it builds awareness, it builds profile and it's a brilliant positioning tool. What it is not, at least most of the time, is a direct lead or sales-driving activity. And as I asserted in part one of this series of posts, if the impact of social media is on human behaviour, the direct ROI is very difficult to measure. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. In fact, our clients and directors demand it. So my big question is: how can we use an understanding of online human behaviour to measure social media marketing?
The key, I believe, lies in psychology and in developing a detailed understanding of how social media affects the decision making process. Only by doing this can we understand the true value of social media throughout the buying cycle, learn how to engage with and influence consumers effectively and measure the true outcomes of social marketing activity. The rest of the social media evaluation chatter is irrelevant.
Yesterday I attended the TechMAP seminar in London as part of Social Media Week, and was thrilled to hear a fantastic presentation by Benjamin Ellis on this very topic (note: other than this one paragraph, the rest of this post was written prior to this presentation). Benjamin presented many ideas that go against the social media grain, at times to a hushed room; ideas that echo the first post I wrote in this series (did i mention that you should read that?!). These included the assertion that the reason we're all so set on measuring social media is because business makes it necessary: someone has to pay for us to do it! He stated that numbers fit into the management paradigm, and so we end up taking ambiguous online conversations and trying to turn them into neat metrics to take to the boardroom, comparing this to the early days of the internet when we were forced to measure largely irrelevant website metrics.
I couldn't agree more with Benjamin's thinking and it gives me a little more confidence to reveal a model that I've adopted and am developing further to (hopefully) enable me to demonstrate the true value of social media to business owners. So here it is:
If followed correctly, this intentionally simple model enables brands to effectively engage consumers online throughout the entire buying process, no matter at what stage in that process they may be. But now it's over to you; I'm crowdsourcing this mother!
In the final part of this series I want to look at how we might use tracking tools to gauge highly relevant, people-centric performance indicators at each stage of the process in order to gain a realistic idea of ROI with none of the bullshit. But I believe in the wisdom of the crowd and I want YOUR help and input to develop this model further.
So please, tell me what you think of the model I've suggested here, both good and bad: how it can be improved and what specific evaluation tools, metrics and techniques are relevant to each stage. Leave a comment below, tweet me or email me: any and ALL input is very, very welcome and will be fully credited. If we collaborate, I'm convinced we can come up with something we can all use and benefit from. Over to you...
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