So my position is relatively new. I’m in the Tech department. I help with lots of online stuff, and am in charge of all things social media, including blog, forum, Facebook, Twitter, and general monitoring. I also keep up with the trends in Search Engine Optimization, which is to say I confirm that it’s mostly nonsense outdated two or three or twelve Google algorithms ago, with some common sense thrown in.
I am at heart a social-media-for-businesses skeptic; I won’t be at all surprised if we all look back in ten years and say “Can you BELIEVE how much time we wasted farting around with Facebook?!” But right now, it does seem to be needed, or expected. Some people get pissy and frustrated if they can’t interact with your biz on FB. And all the other guys are doing it. Our competitors have more fans and engagement and Virality than we do! Oh noes!
I do believe it’s valuable if done right, but often done wrong by marketing folks. (generally, right = informal, fast, completely without hype, and offering honestly valuable information or content, whatever that is in context.) But how do you measure that value? or, you know, ROI?
My boss’s boss wants to hear metrics – numbers, context, comparisons – that justify doing anything with FB etc. at all. As she points out, while we have lots more Likes than we did last year, it’s still a tiny tiny fraction of our customer base (and tinier still of our potential base). So why do it at all? Why not delete the FB page and put up our Customer Service phone number instead, boot me, and hire on another marketing specialist whose performance can be justified by x% rise in sales?
What are the reaonable arguments for doing corporate social media, and how should success or failure be measured?
Think of this, we live in a 75% paperless society, that’s a staggering statistic.
You have to assess your target audience and go from there.
If I was doing it I’d take a client list of say 50 names and find them on facebook and put a check beside their name if they are on and - if they are not.
Do a + take away count at the end and say based on 50 random customers, this many are on facebook.
Also get a timer and start from you logging in to your posting the update or message. Take that and divide it by your pay and show them what it cost for you to post that message and how many customers you would have to get in order for you to justify that one post. If 29 of the 50 are on facebook, then maybe they make that one extra purchase or something which justifies your existence.
Don’t give out too many details where you make yourself expendable because you’ve told them how to do it, now you aren’t needed. Also don’t give all the verbiage where they can go to Craigslist and say I need this specifically done, how much and you got 50 replies of $20.
Does that help?
You should check out a copy of Brandwashed. I just finished reading a chapter which mentioned Facebook and how we are more likely to “like” something our friends like.
Page 119-120
Do you happen to like the TV show Friday Night Lights? If you go to that show’s Facebook page, it will tell you how many of your friends of yours also “like” the show. Wait, Erica likes Friday Night Lights, too? You think Erica is pretty cool and have now received what marketers refer to as “social proof” that it’s okay to like the show, giving you a mandate to recommend the show to your best friends, so before you know it, you click the “like” button - which has conveniently popped up right up on the bottom of the page - too. This will then show up on the newsfeed for all your friends to see, and they in turn may well reach for the “like” button and so on and so forth until any Facebook user who comes across a mention of the show will spy a little message popping up saying that “Bob and Fred and Martin and 712,563 Facebook users like Friday Night Lights.” This is peer-pressure advertising at its best and it works. According to Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, marketers have known this for a really long time. “I’m much more likely to do [or buy] something that’s been recommended by a friend,” she’s been quoted as saying.
I promise you, there are peer-reviewed studies out there on the effectiveness of social network marketing. A quick look at my own university’s article database confirms this- there are studies on everything from using facebook in science libraries to using it in pharmaceutical marketing. You can find high-quality experimental studies, with baselines and control groups and the works that support your cause. You could even do a quick literature review of similar projects and pull out some “best practices” of known successful interventions.
I think that if you start with defining what you consider to be a success, that will help you determine what tools you should use to measure your efforts.
There’s lots of ways to go:
[ul]
[li]Brand awareness? We know that a brand that you think about is one you’re more likely to purchase from.[/li]
[li]A numerical goal, such as getting x number of people to register for an event or getting samples of your product into y number of influencer’s hands? [/li]
[li]Looking to drive traffic to a site? Looking to gather addresses for future email marketing?[/li][/ul]
You get the idea. I would actually start by doing an audit of what your competitors are doing, if you haven’t already.
My company uses Yammer to announce projects, events, and that sort of thing. The sales people link to articles of where the business is going, on business speculation, and other things that are relevant to the sales people.
We have ‘groups’ within Yammer where, for instance, HR will talk about various upcoming events. We will network and discuss various ideas (hey, are we going to do a 10,000 steps this year?).
The communication folks will link to any videos that do and any corporate mission statements/goals (like ‘no waiting on hold’ initiatives).
Sometimes bosses will praise their employees - I think I see this less because they do this within their own groups though.
I’m not sure how this relates to ROI, but it keeps the company connected and how we have it set up it’s only our company (as opposed to the openness of FB).
Speak his language. Somehow come by a print copy of the 26 September issue of Forbes magazine. The one with the big red speech balloon on the cover ''Social Power and the Coming Corporate Revolution.
If you can’t do that, at least go on line and pick up talking points yourself.
You know, this is exactly where I went wrong ni the initial conversation – I was defining success in terms of a post’s popularity compared to our own previous posts and compared to our competitors’ posts, and our own fan count growth vs. theirs. But it turns out she expected to hear about our success relative to our potential user base. As in, what percentage of all our potential customers are in fact our Facebook fans? :eek: Given that the number of people who COULD use our products is oh, somewhere in the millions, our ~3000 fans look pretty piddly. Given the hundreds of thousands who DO use our products? – again, piddly. Compared to one of our competitors, a huge company with a huge variety of products, not just ones that compete with ours, who has a full-time team of social media managers? Piddly. Compared to another of our competitors, a tiny company with one product? OMG impressive. Compared to other similar-size companies in the same general business? Pretty damn good, TYVM. Compared to our own parent company, who is presumably who my boss is worried about justifying herself to? Um, well, we have three times their fans and dozens of times their engagement, but they’re a parent company, and who wants to FB-Friend huge conglomerates?
So my mission is to explain/demonstrate to her that her definition of success is possibly out of whack. This, I do not know how to do.
The vast majority of resources I can find that discuss this subject say something like what most of you are saying: Define your goals carefully and measure success against them. It’s the goals themselves I’m getting the hassle about.
Of course, I suspect the percentage of all your potential customers are in fact your actual customers is pretty :eek:, too. That doesn’t mean you should pull all your advertising because it’s a waste of time.
Also, how much time do you spend actually doing social media for the company per week? How much time is it taking you to gather up all these figures? It would be pretty damn stoopit to invest more resources in justifying using social media than you invest in actually using the social media.
I guess the best argument for redefining your boss’s measure of success is to try and figure up the FB-fan/actual customer base ratios for other companies–even hugely successful companies with huge market saturation have a relatively small fraction of FB followers to total customers. I’d expect that number to be much smaller for smaller businesses that it’s not as cool to “like.” If your percentages are in line with or better than your similarly-sized competitors, that seems pretty successful to me.
The metric you want is the number of friends your fans have. Your fans know about you. Their friends are the people you want to reach. When they fan you, that information is seen by all their friends. And as more people in your circle like something, facebook suggests you might like it too.
You also want to try tracking mentions on you in posts. I’m not much of a facebook user, so when I post that I just had a great meal at La Cucaracha, few people see it. My husband has several hundred friends, other friends have a thousand or more. If my husband mentions he had a great meal, several hundred people who like him enough to follow him (and therefore will weight his opinion higher than a radio ad) suddenly got advertised to - and without advertising.
Oh, good point. Facebook calls that “reach” and/or “virality” and gives page admins lots of nifty stats on both.
moejoe, due to the nature of our niche, our fans are almost always already customers (or would be if they were allowed to make purchasing decisions). Nobody who doesn’t already know quite a bit about our products is likely to seek us out on FB. I imagine that’s true for many businesses, come to think of it. If you’ve never sipped a Coca-Cola, why would you Like the Coca-Cola Company on FB?
Since what I mentioned before seemed to help a little, let’s keep going.
Defining your social media marketing goals shouldn’t be too challenging since they need to link into your existing marketing. You’re kind of halfway there, just give it some more thought.
Since I don’t know the details of your business, let me outline one specific way I’ve used social media marketing in the past:
We wanted to get x number of attendees to a conference. We had a mailing list we of course marketed to but we felt that there was a significant portion of our FB fans NOT on this list. How to test this? We built a custom tab on our FB page with an embedded registration form and bought some targeted ads. We got additional paid attendees from that ad, plus of course now they are in our own database for future marketing needs.
Obviously, this was quite measurable and trackable since the sole place the ad showed up was in FB, and it directed people to our FB page where they needed to “like” us, and then some of them even registered for the event. We knew which ones came to us through this and which came to us on our normal site by building the FB sign up page to go into a database separate from the one our own site fed into.
That’s one use - I’m sure you can look at a specific goal and then think of ways you’d extend your reach using social media. Being able to find an opportunity you can outline, test and report back on will convince your boss to let you try it to see if its really worth the company’s time and money.
ETA: I’d like to add this to anyone reading my comments: I’m a marketing professional based in NYC and looking for a new job, so please feel free to contact me if you have an opportunity you think might be of interest.
Likely cost of the competition having a superior presence. Of current customers how many could potentially be swayed away from you, or at least less likely to recommend you to others?
Likely benefit of having a superior product. How many of your competition’s current customers could be swayed to you? Of current potential customers with no product loyalty, how many, relative to your current base (the metric that matters) could a superior presence deliver?
What is the risk of a poorly managed presence? (The one disgruntled customer using your own wall to post defamatory remarks about you, for example.)
Also be aware of articles like this one in today’s WSJ:
Yes, that study was specific to TV, but she, understandably, wants data that is as hard as that showing the opposite for your product in your market with your demographics. Your mission is to convince her, in the absence of such hard data, that the cost of a superior presence is minimal compared to the possible (better probable) costs (and opportunity costs) of an absent, inferior, or poorly managed presence. If your cost is not much less than those possible gains/avoided losses, if you cannot at least argue such cogently, then yes, any good boss may consider an alternative marketing tactic than using you. Would you blame her?
Hell no, I totally would not blame her. However, I would blame her for hiring me – knowing full well I’m a tech editor with no background, no experience, no education, and no interest in marketing – specifically to “handle” social media, then not giving me any parameters or even any suggestions about how to proceed, and then ridiculing me in front of all our co-workers when I present what seemed, logically, according to my fairly extensive but definitely naive research, to be reasonable facts about how it’s going. I was a bit blindsided by being required to both define what I’ve been asked to do and justify it. Happy to have a job though!
Like I said, I’m frankly suspicious of claims that social media is a good thing for most companies to spend time on, and it does not surprise me that big buzz ≠ big customers in the TV scenario you mention. In truth, if it were up to my boss, we probably wouldn’t be messing with this stuff. She’s getting pressure from other people (parent company as well as key creative talent) to the effect that Social Media Is a Must, and I’m not surprised that she’s frustrated with that.
Could she be looking for you to give her the arguments that she needs to defend herself, and her decision to invest in the sector by way of hiring you, to her bosses?
In any case, I did find this that may be of some help in formulating your sales pitch.
This oversimplifies things, but you are doing a marketing specialists job. Social media is at it’s core marketing. Why a company would have a IT person dealing with this is bizarre to me. The justifications for doing social media are identical to those used to justify marketing expenditures, which is why they are loosely measured by overall company success.
There are small facets of this which fall into customer service and CS like marketing is difficult to measure for most companies who don’t spend a lot of energy with professional services.
It doesn’t sound to me like you should be finding statistics to justify your work to your boss. It sounds like you should be offloading this work to the marketing department or having yourself reassigned to the marketing department. Social media is no more technical than sending emails or answering phones.
