I was inspired by a great Blog from Mashable to look at some of the current thinking on Marketing measurement. Prashant Suryakumar, who wrotethis article makes the point that:
‘There are no “best practices” for measuring a successful social media campaign. Crowd behavior is dynamic and context-specific, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to build a “one size fits all” solution.’
He goes on to make the point that there is a lot of data points that can be captured in social media, but not all of them are relevant and that metrics need to be divided into those that identify influencers in your community, those that help businesses understand engagement and the conversations that are being had (reputation) and finally those that show how social media is impacting the business holistically. As he says: ‘Measuring the impact of increased chatter for your brand might not always translate to more revenue for the business. Measuring cause and effect between buzz, branding and sales might show different dynamics for different product groups.‘ For me, this is the crux of the issue – how does social media activity impact the bottom line? Understanding this better will be the challenge for 2011. For an indication that certain social networking tools, specifically Blogs, can drive identifiable inbound leads, check out this Blog from Tiecas, which quotes Hubspot data – and which chimes with my own experience.
Funnel Management and ROI
However, while social networking measurement may be the subject
de jour
we should not forget that measuring any returns from Marketing is still a minority sport. According to a report quoted on
DemandGen that I tweeted a couple of weeks ago (@j_ceri
), the
Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA) ‘
found that 64.9% of BtoB marketers cannot track ROI, while 58% do not qualify inquiries prior to lead distribution.