Social Media is about connecting people and sharing thoughts, ideas, feedbacks, and information. CRM is about connecting and creating stickiness to the brand. You measure CRM programs efficiency checking the returning visitors, time spent, evolution of the customer average shopping cart, % of subscription cancelled, % of new members recruited, ... Social Media is a different tool to lead people to CRM programs. There's then no discussion about how to measure impact of engagement with social media.

Discussing about how Social Media can change brand reputation, credibility, awareness, engagement, and other qualitative items is fine. But does that really matter? You can say to consumers we have a better reputation and engagement rate than your competitors, but what does it mean? And who cares?
Wouldn't it be more interesting to know what's the impact of social media for your business? how many new customers you've attracted through your actions in the social media area? how many useful information came from your social media activity?

I do believe Social Media activity increase reputation, stickiness, and engagement with the brand. I do also believe big companies need to know what are the best practices to efficiently use that new tool. But the best way to know how useful Social Media is, is by connecting activity on that field to CRM program. Using social media tools like community platform, community management (includes management in and out of the community, relationships management with non-branded communities), and digital PR (connect online with influencers, and get them noticed of what you do - eventually evangelism) would definitly add to your traditional CRM program a new dimension: sharing. Which would then generate more traction for your CRM program.
But do not think about the sole social media area. That's just not that. Social Media has to be directly connected to your brand activity. It's not only about joining the conversation, it's about how to shape your social media activity to fit the needs of the company. To make the social media a laser focused tool on generating real valuable items: increasing subscription to your services, to your CRM program, to increase the time spent on your web platform, and ultimately to make your customers buy more.

To answer Amber's question, "What do you think, can you effectively measure the importance and impact of listening? How?", I'd say there's no need to measure the impact of listening, since it's just half of the way to leverage Social Media. What generates impact is action following from listening, and that thing can simply be measured by:

• Increase of traffic since social media activity
• Results of ideas implementation coming from social media activity (listening in that case)
• % of new members in the CRM program
• Evolution of the average shopping cart

Photo Credit: nobleIgnoble

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By Romain Péchard
Fast.Fwd.Innov@tion