David Meerman Scott says, “We’ve been trained that everything gets measured down to a sales lead – If that’s how you measure social media, than forget it”. Those are some powerful words knowing that the dollars you are responsible for when marketing your organization traditionally needs a return on investment measurement. Engaging in social media and certain areas of eMarketing requires redefining what success looks like. No longer is ROI the main metric, rather ROE – Return on Engagement.
With that being said, are you still interested in trying to sell your boss on social media and eMarketing? Or as a small business, do you still want to invest the time required to successfully execute a campaign in social media? It sounds crazy, but you can’t be successful with new media if you are measuring it with old metrics.
Think about all the other areas your organization or business invests in that does not tie an ROI to its investment – logos, branding, sponsorships, t-shirts and so forth. You know it has an impact, but you can’t measure its success.
So what does success look like in social media? I look at five key areas when measuring whether or not your engagement is successful and it can be measured in phases as well:
- Content, content, content. When first getting involved, it’s about creating and generating content — whether via video, tweets, blogging or status updates. You can see if people are interested in the type of content being posted. If your content is primarily focused on selling and pushing information in people’s faces about your organization, then the interactions are going to be minimal and people will not be interested in considering going into the next step of ROE — contribution. Play with your content and test to see what does or doesn’t work. Post content and talk about industry related topics and news that is relevant to your expertise or area of profession, but don’t sell all the time. 80 percent informational, 20 percent promotional.
- Contribution. Now that you are getting comfortable with content, its time to see how people are contributing. As you do some trial and error with content, notice how people contribute to your postings. Are people commenting, tagging or interacting on any type of level? If you are askign a question, do they say yes or no or are they responding with 3-5 word answers? If so, you’re on the right path of achieving success. If not, it might be time to take a step back and re-evalaute the POST strategy presented in the book Groundswell by Forrester Research. This strategy for social media focuses on choosing the technology last and determining your profiles/people first. Once you get comfortable in these areas, it is important to begin to focus on developing conversations, which takes us to the third level of measurement when looking at ROE.
Conversation. How do you start developing a conversation where the responses and interactions are no longer just a few words or yes and no replies? People are beginning to answer or replay in sentences and proposing new questions or sources for content within your postings. When getting to a stage of conversation, it is extremely important to be highly involved in your social media presence. Letting two days go by without any interaction will discourage individuals from actively partaking in the conversation and will poorly impact your ROE. The other element to this level of interaction is the conversation that is created. Is it always going to be positive or content that you intended to receive? Probably not. Creating a strategy that keeps you involved and responding is highly important, whether the conversation is neutral, negative or beneficial to your overall objectives.- Engagement. Congrats, social media guru! Hopefully at this point your time spent on social media is ranging from 2-3 hours per day and you have conversations and relationships being built on multiple platforms with strong content in a niched area. Now that you have a captured audience, go back to your POST strategy concept and see how it relates to the people you were trying to reach and the objectives you set out for each group. Crafting your conversations and relationships to engage your followers and participants beyong just a conversation, but focusing more on interactions. Are you trying to get people to sign up for your newsletter or check out a webinar? Here is where you draw them into a micro site, landing page or free content to begin the process of truly seeing results. The relationship is not focused on selling, but excelling in your niched area and giving things away to get to the last level of ROE measurement.
- Activity. Activity could be considered sales, or a referral, but that doesn’t sound appropriate when talking about social media quite yet. If social media was so heavily involved with the terms of ROI and sales, many folks not sold on it yet would have expectations that could not always be fulfilled. At this level of engagement, you should have a good idea of those you can work with, whether mutually or by selling your organization to them. It may be a very defined group or individual, but knowing that you have developed relationships, which ultimately sell in the traditional or the digital arena, your ROE has been obtained.
How is your organization measuring the investment into your social media strategy?