Monday, June 15, 2009

Cheers to Social Media

Great presentation summing up an experiment in using social media to promote the Wandsworth Common Beer Festival in March 2009. (I attended this, but was unaware of the social media element; I got an email from my mate Steve).
From their results (chart 11)
- Social Media should be a part of any marketing and promotional campaign
- Social Media + Search = more traffic, more results
- The ROI will be positive. This is a cheap and easy way to get results
- Be active and review your activity daily, then refine and repeat. Then review, refine & repeat again

See also - Two great local business twitter case studies & Memo to social media gurus

2 comments:

afullerview said...

Thanks for posting about the case study. I know you're a data guy, so here's my question: what are the best measures of social media ROI?

And what do you think of these comments I had via email:

"On social media, I [ANON] have a defined point of view:
- That it is an input not an output
- That it has replaced PR and crisis management all at once
- That current practitioners are measuring results and ROI the wrong way
- That success for brand marketers leveraging social media has a very low bar
- That it is meaningful to gather data about content as opposed to the users who consume it

[AND] ... most measures are about how many consumers touched the content. So the brand marketer can say, "we got 200K unique visitors to our content via tweets and our youtube channel" et al.

IMHO, the right measure is not how many consumers touched the content, but how many ways the content was touched. Did they tweet a new word that is part of the campaign? Like "tradigital" and "old school new media" more than merely "mentions", there are more metrics that matter."

Would be interested in your PoV on social media metrics in general! Here or over on http://afullerview.wordpress.com/

Dan said...

Hi Dylan!
I kind of agree with the ANON commenter that at the moment people are looking far more at the delivery of the message in social media (how many people see it) than effect of it (what benefits the transmission of the message has brought). That's what I though was so good about your case study. Through use of social media seeding, and sales through Eventbrite you had a pretty controlled environment for your experiment (I remember that you're a scientist by training!).

Measurement of any campaign depends on success against objectives - if the objective is reach, and sometimes it is, then fine, delivery metrics are what you need. If the success is based on revenue or footfall, then measure that.

The problem comes in the greyer areas, like for films, for example. There are so many determinants of a film's performance (quality of the film, stars, other media activity, other films out that week, other events on that week etc), so you need to find proxies to measure against instead for that part of the campaign. & If these are the problems with films, just think of the problems you've got with cars!

I've seen various models of this sort of measurement using proxies, assigning values to blog posts, re-tweets etc, and some of these are persuasive, but it's really all about having clear campaign objectives and then a way to measure against that.

In your case it was a local, short term revenue and footfall goal, and from your results you definitely acheived ROI on that!

I'll also post this to your blog.

Dan

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