On Friday we posted about an experiment running on one of our online communities, comparing paid and organic search strategies. This is just one of the ways that our clients measure the ROI of their online community - by increased traffic from organic search or significant savings on their paid search bills.
Measuring ROI is an important topic in social media, all the communities that we build at FreshNetworks have very clear ROI cases. We spend time during the planning and strategy phases working on the objectives of the online community and how we can measure this. This may be increased sales, a specific number of new ideas generated for the business, increased retention rate, traffic to an ecommerce platform, savings in market and consumer research spending... The areas where online communities can contribute to business objectives can be vast and depend on the specific needs of the business. Time spent working on this is time well spent.
That's why this week's Required Reading is a great presentation on Social Media ROI from Egg Co. I particularly like the way that they break down an ROI measure into a Success Metric and then into a Goal. This is very similar to the way we work with clients at FreshNetworks, and the examples in the presentation show how this approach to ROI can show the real impact social media can have.
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Some more reading
- Social media is here to stay... Now what? (vator.tv)
- Five ways to use an online research community in 2009 (freshnetworks.com)
- Should We Even Consider ROI in Social Media? (kylelacy.com)
- 10 practical questions about Social Media (webnomena.com)
- What is the value of listening to social media channels for your organization? (beth.typepad.com)
- Is 2009 the year of social media & return on investment? (socialmediatoday.com)
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