There was quite a conversation on the LinkedIn board on my post "Facebook advertising case study: But what did it do for sales ?". The bottom line in my article is that soft metrics like impressions and engagement mean very little if they didn't directly contribute to the business objectives of increasing sales, lowering costs or increasing customer satisfaction.

Integrated marketing is the key to a successful marketing program but the question arises; "how do we measure each component within an integrated marketing initiative so that we optimize our channel mix?" This question is nothing new and marketers have been struggling with this for years.

Let's revisit the Cheerios Facebook strategy for a minute. Their objective was; Growing the number of people who have connected to Cheerios' Facebook Page. I would argue that this should not have been an objective but a strategy. To me the strategy should have been "increase sales of Cheerios". How are we going to do this ? Well one of the ways we are going to do this is by "growing the number of people on Cheerios Facebook page." Measurements would than have to be put in place to directly show how growing the number of people of Cheerios Facebook page directly contributed to one of the three objectives of social media. Does this make sense ?

I have argued that awareness does not lead to conversion. This could be true for most products for "feel good" products like chocolate cookies or donuts this is probably not true. I mean nobody is going to "shop" around and compare opinions on chocolate Orio's or a chocolate Dunkin Donut cake donut.

Marketers have to ensure that metrics are in place to measure every marketing dollar and every channel. They need to know what channel(s) are driving business and which channels are "nice to have" but don't drive business objectives. In my local market there are bags of private label Cheerios right next to the brand with a sign saying "save over 30%". I would ask "is a Facebook page leading consumers to chose the brand over the private label and does the customer see equity within our brand to spend an additional 30% ?"