How to calculate Return on Investment for Social

Media Marketing Campaigns

Rudy Kawmi – March 2011

Acknowledgments

Firstly I would like to thank my dissertation supervisor, AC Muir, for exposing me to the world
of social media and thus inadvertently leading me to undertake this interesting topic.

I would also like to thank my brother Albert Kawmi. Our constant discussions about social
media and my topic in particular helped me greatly. He and Christian Moufarrej kindly agreed
to proof read my work and for that I am very thankful.

I am especially grateful to all the interviewees who, in keeping with the spirit of social media,
so willingly shared their knowledge and opinions.

Finally I would like to thank Lynsey Proctor for always being there to help, my partner Harriet
Fortune for her constant support and most of all to my parents, Lily and Riad Kawmi, for
everything.

Thank you all,

Rudy Kawmi

Glasgow, March 2011

2
Abstract
Social media has opened up a whole new channel to marketers and represents a fundamental
shift from traditional marketing mediums. Described as the social media „conversation‟ this
dissertation investigates how marketers can calculate their return on investment (ROI) for social
media marketing campaigns.

With social media still in its infancy, there was limited academic content for this dissertation to
rely on. Secondary research therefore largely consisted of the most influential and up-to-date
blogs and articles that surround the social media ROI debate online. Key themes were
highlighted through this research that showed the importance of using goals and objectives,
coupled with integrated metrics and analytics to evaluate and monitor social media marketing
activities. There was also clear evidence of strong demand from marketing professionals for
better methods of calculating ROI. However controversies were also discovered regarding the
scope of ROI, with a divide between those defining return in terms of revenue and cost
reductions, and those arguing that it must also incorporate intangible returns such as increased
brand awareness, greater reach and improved sentiment.

The primary research, in the form of interviews with leading social media marketers in the
Glasgow area as well as interviews with leading bloggers in the field, was aimed at shedding
more light around the key themes and to better understand how an organization can best
approach calculating ROI.

The implications of the findings showed that the process can be made much easier by properly
developing goals and objectives and integrating these into a social and digital media strategy.
This, coupled with the methods described in the interviews for directly linking revenue and
sales, can allow for more accurate ROI calculations. However the most evident part of the
research highlighted the many difficulties surrounding calculating ROI for social media. This
was mainly focused on the difficulty in incorporating indirect financial impacts such as
increased brand awareness into the ROI model. It was also revealed that though some sales can
be directly linked to social media marketing efforts, there is an inevitable break in the link when
purchases are made through other channels even though the purchase intent may have stemmed
from social media marketing efforts.
These difficulties indicate there is great scope for further research to be carried out investigating
the potential of overcoming the challenges highlighted. However, the conclusion of this
research provides three steps towards outlining how ROI can be calculated for social media
marketing, and towards improving practice in this field:

• clear setting of goals for ROI,

• defining the scope of ROI and,

• understanding the metrics of ROI so that social media campaigns can be intrinsically better-
designed with ROI measurement in mind

4
 Table of Contents
Acknowledgments......................................................................................................................... 2

Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... 3

1. Introduction ................................................................................................................. 7

2. Methodology ................................................................................................................ 8

2.1 Research Aim & Objectives:................................................................................................... 8

2.2 Research Strategy and Approach: ........................................................................................... 8

2.2.1 Research Timeline ............................................................................................................... 9

2.3 Secondary Research: ............................................................................................................... 9

2.4 Primary Research: ................................................................................................................. 10

2.4.1 Why semi-structured Interviews? ...................................................................................... 10

2.4.2 Sample: .............................................................................................................................. 11

2.4.3 Sample Criteria .................................................................................................................. 12

2.4.4 Face-to-face Interviews ...................................................................................................... 12

2.4.5 Online Interviews ............................................................................................................... 12

2.4.6 Ethical Considerations ....................................................................................................... 13

2.5 Data Analysis ........................................................................................................................ 13

2.5.1 Triangulation: ..................................................................................................................... 13

2.6 Difficulties and Limitations: ................................................................................................. 14

3. Literature Review...................................................................................................... 15

3.1 What is Social Media? .......................................................................................................... 15

3.2 Why is Social Media important to businesses? ..................................................................... 16

3.3 Defining ROI ........................................................................................................................ 17

3.4 How ROI is calculated with traditional marketing ............................................................... 19

3.5 The importance of measuring effectiveness.......................................................................... 20

3.6 The use of objectives, goal setting and metrics..................................................................... 21

3.7 Difficulties in calculating ROI for Social Media .................................................................. 24

3.7.1 The Scope of ROI .............................................................................................................. 24

3.7.2 Identifying the Revenue Link ............................................................................................ 25

3.7.3 Goals, objectives and Strategy ........................................................................................... 25

4. Discussion and Findings ........................................................................................... 27

4.1 What should the scope of social media ROI be?................................................................... 27

4.2 Goals, objectives and strategy ............................................................................................... 29

4.3 The use of metrics in calculating ROI .................................................................................. 31

4.4 Main difficulties in calculating ROI ..................................................................................... 33

5. Conclusion.................................................................................................................. 35

5.1 Best Practice.......................................................................................................................... 35

5.2 Difficulties ............................................................................................................................ 35

5.3 Further Research ................................................................................................................... 36

6. Bibliography .............................................................................................................. 37

APPENDIX A – Charts and Graphics ........................................................................ 41

A1................................................................................................................................................ 41

A.2............................................................................................................................................... 42

A.3............................................................................................................................................... 42

A.4............................................................................................................................................... 43

A. 5.............................................................................................................................................. 43

A.6............................................................................................................................................... 44

APPENDIX B –Interviewee Information.................................................................... 45

APPENDIX C – Interviews .......................................................................................... 46

C.1 Interview with Mike McGrail............................................................................................... 46

C.2 Interview in person with Colin Boyd and Greg Ruxton from Boyd Digital. ....................... 57

C.3 Interview with Gary Ennis from NS Design. ....................................................................... 70

C.4 Interview with Julie Tait form Culture Sparks. .................................................................... 80

C.5 Interview with Jason Falls .................................................................................................... 86

C.6 Interview with Jacquie McCarnan. ....................................................................................... 88

APPENDIX D – Ethical Approval Form .................................................................... 91

D.1............................................................................................................................................... 92

6
1. Introduction
This dissertation was undertaken with the aim to investigate how return on investment (ROI) is
calculated for social media marketing campaigns.

The focus on social media in particular is due to a number of reasons. Firstly, social media
represents a new field in marketing. The fact that it is a fast-growing sector, with organizational
involvement increasing year by year, makes it an attractive candidate for research. However,
perhaps most importantly, social media marketing represents a significant shift from traditional
marketing channels. Where traditional marketing media such as television, radio, and print was
characterized as „broadcast‟ or „one way‟ forms of communication, social media is being
described as a medium of conversation. Between customers and companies, between people and
friends, and business to business; social media requires your potential customers to be engaged
in what you are saying. With such a shift many questions arise: can the old methods of
calculating ROI be transferrable to this medium? How does reach, engagement, influence,
sentiment, brand awareness integrate with the bottom line? And does the digital aspect of social
media marketing mean that measuring and monitoring marketing efforts becomes easier or more
accurate?

These questions and others point to the potential and significance of pursuing further research in
this topic area.

The dissertation will be structured as follows. Firstly, the research methodology will be
discussed to frame the following gathering, analysis and critiquing of primary and secondary
research. The literature review will then further refine the parameters of this research by
highlighting the key themes and indicating areas of deficiency in the existing literature. Once
this is done, the discussion of the findings of the primary research can be laid out to address the
areas highlighted by the literature review. The final outcome will regard concluding how ROI is
calculated for social media marketing, what the main difficulties discovered were, along with a
proposal of three steps for overcoming these difficulties, based on the most important findings
of the research. It is hoped this will show how ROI can be calculated for social media
marketing.
2. Methodology

2.1 Research Aim & Objectives:

Aim: Investigate how return on investment can be calculated for social media marketing
campaigns

This will be undertaken by:

1. Researching existing practices for return on investment analysis in social media through
literature and interviews with current practitioners.

2. Discussing problems and limitations of calculating ROI in social media marketing.

3. Performing a critical analysis of literature and interview data to highlight key concepts in
evaluating ROI for social media.

4. Proposing concepts for working towards best practice in this field.

The specific methodology employed will now be critically discussed along with the choice of
materials. The interview selection and processing method will also be justified here.

2.2 Research Strategy and Approach:

It was decided that a qualitative analysis of secondary data coupled with primary data in the
form of interviews would allow the dissertation to successfully address the question of how ROI
can be calculated for social media marketing. This is because it was evident from the outset that
the issues and methods surrounding the subject were of a complex and subjective nature. It did
not seem possible to employ a quantitative research design that could address the ambiguities in
the topic and quantify existing ROI practices.

The interviews formed the crux of the research methodology as access to leading professionals
in the field would bring specialist knowledge to the findings. This was of particular importance
due to the non-academic nature of the majority of secondary research available, which will be
discussed in more detail shortly.

The research can be described as an inductive study, in that “…the researcher infers the
implications of his or her findings for the theory that prompted the whole exercise…” (Bryman,
2008, p.9).

8
2.2.1 Research Timeline
Research began in October 2010 in order to further refine the dissertations aims and objectives.
This was done by starting with a wide reading range regarding social media and ROI practices
in general, as well as consultations with the dissertation supervisor AC Muir. Once a better
understanding of the literature was attained, a draft was completed by mid-December 2010
outlining the research question.

During this time secondary research was on going, with relevant material being published up
until the very late stages of the dissertation. In January 2011 the interview questions were drawn
up and contacts established. The interview process was complete by mid-February 2011 and so
analysis began from that date, with the conclusion of this research in early March.

2.3 Secondary Research:

The secondary sources used in the proposal can be split into two categories: academic work and
non-academic online sources. However due to the fact that social media is a relatively new field,
there was a definite shortage of peer-reviewed academic literature available. As such, a variety
of sources were consulted:

 Journals

 Blogs

 Online Presentations

 White papers

 Analyst reports and statistics

 Books

 E-books

 News Articles

The journals were mainly gathered from JSTOR and Google Scholar. Access to JSTOR journals
was gained through the university access for students. Although no specific journals relating to
social media ROI could be found, works regarding ROI of more traditional marketing
techniques were used.

Textbooks were gathered from the Glasgow University Library and were focused on the
research into traditional marketing media as well as identifying the general themes. This was
supplemented by the authors own private books directly relating to social media. Towards the
latter stages of the dissertation write up, some influential books were released regarding social
media ROI . These were purchased and integrated where relevant to the existing literature
review in order to represent the most up-to-date possible literature.

Some books located online were only available for reading via Amazon Kindle Service . These
were downloaded and also used in addition to the other secondary research. The Kindle system
however does not provide page numbers but instead „Locations‟, so these have been included in
referencing.

Blogs were gathered from search engine findings related to social media ROI as well as the use
of blog aggregation sites such as socialmediatoday.com which compile relevant blog posts from
various contributors into one site. Some authors used presentations and video blogs within blog
posts. These were also referred to within the research to help gain a more thorough
understanding of the subject.

2.4 Primary Research:

The bulk of the primary research was carried out in the form of semi-structured interviews with
people within the social media industry and those studying it. Roughly two-thirds of the
interviews were conducted in person; self-completion questionnaires, sent via email, were
designed for when a face-to-face meeting was not possible.

2.4.1 Why semi-structured Interviews?

Semi-structured interviews involve using a list of “…fairly specific topics to be covered…”
which means that “…the interviewee has a great deal of leeway in how to reply” (Bryman,
2008, p.438). This suits the qualitative nature of the research and because of the specifically
defined scope of social media ROI, the interviews could be somewhat more structured. The
justification behind structuring some aspects of the interviews is because they “promote
standardisation of both the asking of questions and the recording of answers” (Bryman, 2008,
p.194). This is of importance as it helps overcome some of the sources of error associated with
interviewing. These being variation in how the questions are asked and inaccuracy in the
processing of the respondents‟ answers. At the same time, freedom allowed in the interviewees
responses should allow for answers of a greater depth and for the development of the discussion
onto points not previously anticipated.

Both the semi-structured interviews and self-completion questionnaires were constructed using
some closed or fixed choice questions. When the respondent is given a limited choice of
answers interviewer variability is reduced (Bryman, 2008, p.195). However due to the nature of

10
the data being sought, there are many more open-ended questions included in the interview. For
example one of the objectives of the proposals is to obtain information about current ROI
methods used in social media through the interview process. Some questioning regarding this
topic can be closed, for example:

Do you employ a set of criteria for evaluating ROI in social media marketing initiatives?

However more open-ended questions such as:

If so, what are the criteria based on?1

Though an initial set of questions were drawn up, these were continually being revised as the
interview process progressed. Deficiencies highlighted in early interviews allowed any
„problem‟ questions to be refined and improved for the next meeting. In conjunction, each
interview had sections that were more specifically tailored to the interviewee. For example
when interviewing some of the local organisations in the Glasgow area, references to what these
companies advertised on their own websites was used to help garner more detailed responses
and clarify their views.

In terms of recording the responses of face-to-face interviews, audio recordings were made and
later transcribed. This was done to try and ensure that the interviewer does not distort
respondents‟ answers and introduce error (Bryman, 2008, p.202). Some parts of the interviews
which were totally unrelated to the subject area were omitted from the transcripts. These usually
were sections at the end of the interview while recording was still on going.

Questions sent out via email to blog and book authors followed a similar process of question
refinement. Obviously there was no need to transcribe the replies as they were received in a text
format.

2.4.2 Sample:
With the research instruments described, the sample size, criteria and selection techniques will
be laid out here.

Due to the nature of the research proposal some forms of sampling are either incompatible or
unachievable. A random sampling technique, with a large sample size for example, is a method
that would not work for the purposes of this study. The target interviewees are not part of a
homogenous population but rather are specialists and academics within the field of social
media. It is beyond the scope and capabilities of the study to produce a representative sample as
access to a large number of those considered in the social media „population‟ would be
extremely difficult to attain.

1
It should also be noted that in the case of the two questions above, a filter can be used to allow the
interviewer to skip to the next answerable question if the answer to the first is „no‟.
In this case, what is known as a convenience sample was carried out. This type of sample is
described as “one that is simply available to the researcher by virtue of its accessibility”
(Bryman, 2008, p.183). As stated before, it is impossible to generalise the findings using this
approach which is why it is considered acceptable but not ideal.

2.4.3 Sample Criteria

The criteria used to ascertain whether suggested contacts are suitable to include in the sample
were directed by the research objectives stated earlier:

Firstly, anyone who is directly involved in social media marketing campaigns as either a private
company or a marketing service company that caters to social media marketing to help gain a
practical perspective of ROI methods.

Secondly, anyone who is teaching or studying within the academic field of social media and
social media marketing in order to try and gain a theoretical perspective.2

2.4.4 Face-to-face Interviews

For these interviews two methods were used to generate as many suitable interviewees as
possible. Firstly, research was conducted on any company within the Glasgow area that
conducted social media marketing activities. This was done by researching the online websites
of many Glasgow companies that advertised social media services and contacting them via
email, website contact forms or telephone.

Secondly a method of snowball sampling, a form of convenience sampling, was used to

establish contact with other individuals who may be suitable. Here an initial contact with an
individual who is relevant to the research topic is made, then using these interviews to establish
contacts with others (Bryman, 2008, p. 184).

2.4.5 Online Interviews

In order to broaden the scope of interviews, and to try and help overcome the shortcomings of
using blog material instead of more academic work, blog authors and contributors were
contacted and asked to complete a small interview via email.

Those contacted were largely authors of the various blogs and publications used in the literature
review. If an email address was provided, this was used to contact them and make a request to

2
If more time was available, it may have been valuable to include clients of social media marketing
companies along with independent businesses undertaking such marketing campaigns of their own
accord. This is certainly potential scope for future research as discussed in the conclusion of this
dissertation.
12
send some interview questions. If there was no email address available, either website contact
forms or telephone numbers were used.

2.4.6 Ethical Considerations

The primary data collected for this dissertation followed the University of Glasgow Ethics
guide. Please refer to Appendix D.1 for more details

2.5 Data Analysis

Analytic induction would not be possible as it would require the researcher to seek universal
explanations of phenomena “by pursuing the collection of data until no cases that are
inconsistent with hypothetical explanation of a phenomenon are found” (Bryman, 2008, p.539).
Firstly this study is not based around a fixed hypothesis and is incapable of the large amount of
data collection required for analytic induction.

Therefore a Grounded Theory was employed to analyse the data collected. This has become the
most widely used framework for “analysing qualitative data” (Byrman, 2008, p.541). This
meant that the data collected was coded, broken down to component parts which were then
assigned names (Bryman, 2008, p.542). These codes were not conceived before the data was
collected, which would be the case in quantitative research, but afterwards. The researcher then
looked at the data once collected and allowed it to shape the coding structure (Bryman, 2008,
p.541).

The second aspect that will be incorporated from Grounded Theory is that of constant
comparison. It refers to “maintaining a close connection between data and conceptualisation, so
that the correspondence between concepts and categories with their indicators is not lost”
(Bryman, 2008, p.542).

This process was carried out via thorough analysis of the interview transcriptions to extract
answers that fell into the various themes or codes identified by the author. These were then
grouped together under different headings in order to collate all similar views regarding specific
topics. These groupings formed the structure of the discussion and findings sections of the
dissertation.

2.5.1 Triangulation:
This is the use of more than one source of data in the study so that results and findings can be
cross checked. The only opportunity to carry out a form of triangulation is if a large enough
number of interviewees carry out the self-completion questionnaires. However due to the very
low response rate no triangulation of email interview results was possible.
2.6 Difficulties and Limitations:
There were various limitations that influenced the methodology used to carry out the research
for this dissertation. Firstly, the number and quality of interviewees available within the
Glasgow area was limited. Although nearly every company involved or specialising in social
media marketing was contacted, only four organisations or individuals took part in the interview
process.

It was hoped that in order to bring further insight to the literature reviewed from online sources
as many email interviews could be carried out with various blog authors that passed the
sampling requirements. However the response rate was extremely low, resulting in only two
email interviews being conducted.

For this reason, the sample size may be criticised as being too small to be of practical use.
However, all means available were used to ensure the widest range of suitable candidates were
included and the research gathered did prove sufficient in achieving the dissertation aims and
objectives, though this may be considered illustrative rather than completely representative.

14
3. Literature Review
In his MBA thesis on social media for FMCG brands, Helms highlights the need for research
into ROI in social media:

“The final question of how to measure „success‟ in social media is a

crucial one, and would be an ideal subject for further research. The
research for this report indicates that this is a highly controversial area,
and the subject of great current debate. Neither the interviews nor the
literature indicate any emerging consensus on this point. How to judge
the Return on Investment (ROI) of social media marketing campaigns is a
particularly contested point… Overall, this is certainly an area that would
benefit from an in-depth analysis of the sort that was beyond the scope of
this report”

(Helms, 2010)

Whilst this encourages such research, it also requires definition of several theoretical concepts
covered elsewhere in existing literature. Many theories and models have been proposed to
calculate the return on investment for marketing initiatives. Although the literature covers a
wide variety of such practices, this review will be primarily focused on their application to
social media marketing campaigns. The scope of the secondary research will include some
general information regarding the current views on what social media is, how ROI is defined
and its uses in traditional media, the use of metrics, objectives, and goals as well as
considerations for the scope of ROI. This will be concluded with a section highlighting the
major issues that emerged regarding calculating ROI for social media marketing.

These fell into three major areas. Disagreement regarding the scope of ROI, the lack, or
incorrect use of goals, objectives and strategy, and the difficulty in directly linking revenue to
social media activities.

3.1 What is Social Media?

The term itself has been credited to Chris Shipley, co-founder of Guidewire Group, a San
Francisco-based company that researches technology trends. It is argued that social media is
described as the online tools that allow communication of information and participation and
collaboration (Newson et al, 2009, p.49). Author Brian Solis uses a similar definition and
compiles a „Toolbox‟ of social media categories and instruments in his book Engage! Shown
below3:

 Blogs
3
For a more complete list containing actual brand examples of each category please see Appendix A.1
  Social Networks

 Microcommunities

 Microblogs

 Blog communities

 Do-it-yourself and white label social networks

 Micromedia

 Lifestreams (aggregated activity)

(Solis, 2010, p.34)

It should be noted that when looking for definitions of what social media encompasses the date
of any literature plays an important factor. This can be illustrated by how a list compiled by
Newson (et al, 2009, p.50) omits several areas in the „Toolbox‟ quoted from Solis above. This is
because some of these categories only recently have come to existence.

3.2 Why is Social Media important to businesses?

The importance and rising significance of social media marketing has been clearly illustrated in
many recent articles and studies. Erik Qualman points out in his book, Socialnomics, that social
media has enabled a socioeconomic shift where “million-dollar television advertisements are no
longer king influencer of purchase intent” (Qualman, 2009, p.xviii). An example of this shift
can be seen in an article on Direct2Dell4 explaining how Dell Outlet was able to attribute over
$2 million dollars in sales from their Twitter activities. This large sum could in fact be as high
as $3 million if sales generated on other parts of the Dell.com site which were driven from the
Twitter page are added (Dell community website, 2009). However it could be argued that the
discounting and promotional methods used on Twitter to drive these sales are themselves
established marketing techniques. In terms of trend data the picture seems to be much clearer. A
recent study published by Alterian showed that a large majority (75%) of those surveyed stated
that their social/digital marketing budgets would increase over the year 2011, with a quarter of
those overall saying that their budgets will greatly increase (Alterian, 2010). They go on:

“The estimated growth above and beyond overall marketing expenditure

projection is indicative that social/digital marketing will drive general
marketing growth in the coming year.”

4
Direct2Dell is a blog created by Dell which talks about its products, services and customers.
16
 (Alterian, 2010, p.8)

Supporting this view, eMarketer5 estimated that four in five US companies with at least 100
employees will take part in social media marketing, with a steady increase onwards to 20126
(eMarketer, 2010).

However, though there may be clear evidence regarding the growth in social media marketing
spending, some authors disagree about the effectiveness of such investment. Tim Grice7 argues
that social media is an “unprofitable strategy” mainly due to a poor ratio between the time
investment required and return, and that social media suffers from low conversion rates
compared to search engine traffic (Grice, 2009). Other authors argue that the usefulness of
social media is specific to certain geographic areas. Nagi Salloum8 takes the case of social
media marketing in the Arab world and the U.A.E in particular. He argues that the number of
potential customers that could be reached through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media
platforms is a very small percentage of total internet users (Salloum, 2010). This illustrates how
social media adoption for a firms target market can greatly influence the effectiveness of social
media marketing. Though these authors do not negate the facts that social media marketing is a
growing industry with proven revenue generating abilities, they cast a doubt over the
effectiveness for certain types of companies and regions.

Nevertheless, as Erik Qualman points out, most large brands will have conversations and pages
constantly being developed by the social media community (Qualman, 2009, p.186). This is
occurring whether or not the company itself is actively pursuing a social media strategy(Solis,
2010, p.8). Hence it would seem highly advisable, as previously mentioned trends indicate, that
companies should peruse a social media marketing strategy of some kind.

3.3 Defining ROI

Marketing is clearly seen as a form of investment as money is used to finance marketing
campaigns in the hope of receiving monetary gains from such activities. The return on this
investment can be described as “...an accounting measure of income divided by an accounting
measure of investment” (Bhimani et al, 2008, p.647). The Pursuit of marketing ROI can be
labelled as marketing performance measurement or management (MPM). It involves creating a
metrics framework to help evaluate the performance of marketing initiatives against
effectiveness measures and objectives. Such metrics will be described further later on in this
review. For example if a company wants 5% of its sales to come from online channels, it needs

5
eMarketer is an online business that provides “research and trend analysis on digital marketing and
media.”
6
See Appendix A for growth estimates graph.
7
Tim Grice is the full time editor of the SEOwizz blog which focuses on search engine optimization.
8
Nagi Salloum is the founder of Loomni, a Dubai based knowledge sharing & educational platform.
to continually measure revenue from its Internet operations to assess their performance based on
the target objective (Strauss et al, 2003). An MPM strategy is justified because of the
sometimes enormous investment made by firms in their marketing efforts (CGT, 2005).

In terms of marketing ROI, there are a number of different formulae that can be used:

ROI in percentage is:

Marketing ROI = Incremental revenue X Contribution margin% -1.00 X 100%

Marketing Cost

This ROI is described as useful for presenting to executives outside of marketing (Powell et al,
2011, p.201) arguably to help illustrate the contribution marketing initiatives are making and to
help justify marketing budgets. For internal purposes marketers can use more simplified
equations:

ROMI9 = Incremental Revenue

Marketing Cost

This type of equation can be more useful for creating a “simple index… to compare investments
between different media channels” (Powell et al, 2011, p.201). Additionally if marketers wish
to base ROMI on incremental margin rather than revenue the following formula can be used:

mROMI10 = ROMI X Contributing margin %

All formulae from: (Powell et al, 2011, p.201)

These formulae are used by other authors in calculating ROI (Bhimani et al, 2008, p.647-648).
Explanations of the workings and calculations of ROI seem to highlight two obvious
components. Firstly, the need to be able to attribute „marketing cost‟ to any calculation while
also linking any „revenue‟ (incremental or in terms of contribution). These then are the building
blocks and crucial for the success of any ROI methodology.

9
ROMI = „Return on marketing investment‟ (Powell et al, 2011, 201)
10
mROMI = „margin ROMI = The incremental contribution margin generated from a particular
marketing activity divided by the cost of that activity‟ (Powell et al, 2011, 202)
18
3.4 How ROI is calculated with traditional marketing
Before discussing the literature about specific ROI methods for social media marketing, it
would be helpful to start with a wider net including the methods used in traditional11 marketing
campaigns.

An all-inclusive system often used is known as marketing mix modeling (MMM) and is defined
by the American Marketers Association as:

“The Determination of an optimal marketing mix… often aided by models

that take into account the market response to the various marketing mix
elements and their interactions.”

(AMA, 2011)

This is an approach that attempts to take into account the incremental revenue change from
various different marketing activities (Powell et al, 2011, p.209). This is done by first creating a
baseline of sales that would occur in the absence of any marketing and then studying changes in
revenue with regards to specific marketing campaigns. However it is argued that such methods
have a bias for only considering short-term revenue change (Powell et al, 2011, p.209), and that
even as organisations spend billions of dollars annually on marketing, there are few studies
done to assess the long-term effects of these programs (Ataman, 2006, p.26).

Another method used in many organisations is the balanced-scorecard. This approach “links
strategy to measurement by asking firms to consider their vision, critical success factors for
accomplishing it, and subsequent performance metrics...” (Strauss et al, 2003, p.43). Originally
developed by Kaplan and Norton (1996) it can be applied to evaluate the performance of both
business units (such as a marketing department) and people (Jensen, 2001, p.12). The
performance metrics are then divided into four areas as shown on the following page.

Customer Perspective Internal Business Innovation and Financial Perspective

perspective Learning Perspective
Goals Measures Goals Measures Goals Measures Goals Measures

11
„Traditional‟ marketing campaigns is used to refer to TV, Print, Radio and Billboard advertising.
 (Strauss et al, 2003)

This method helps companies go beyond the financial metrics and incorporates both short and
long-term goals. However Jensen argues that the method is flawed because it does not provide a
manager with a score or as he puts it “…no single-valued measure of how they have performed”
(Jensen, 2001, p.3).

Though this is not a comprehensive review of traditional methods of marketing ROI, it does
provide a representation of the commonly used methods. However it would seem that though a
baseline approach such as MMM is logical, it could come into difficulty when there are a
number of marketing campaigns running in parallel. How could deviations from the baseline
sales be attributed to only one of the campaigns? This, and if it applies to social media
marketing ROI will be an area that needs to be addressed in the primary research.

3.5 The importance of measuring effectiveness

In order to properly gauge the success of any marketing campaign, but more specifically here a
social media marketing campaign, it is essential to be able to calculate the return on investment.
An important strategic question firms should ask themselves when embarking on a social media
promotion is whether it is possible to evaluate the effect of any campaign (Thackeray et al,
2008, p.5). eMarketer quotes in an article about the findings of a study12 conducted by the
Altimeter group that:

“Creating ROI measurements tops the list of internal social strategy

objectives for 2011, with 48.3% highlighting that goal.”

(eMarketer, 2011)

This is suggestive that both the need to be able to calculate ROI is not completely fulfilled
within many firms and that it is being given a higher priority within marketing strategies. This is
echoed in a report compiled by Bazaarvoice, showing that in 2010 only 40% of CMO‟s (chief
marketing officers) said they actually achieved linking a part of revenues to their social media
efforts (Bazaarvoice, 2011). Lee Odden writing on TopRank13 highlights how for online
marketing there is a need for tools that can help in monitoring & measurement. He goes on to
describe over twenty such social media management tools that can help monitor the
effectiveness of multiple social network accounts. The growth of such tools could be attributed
by the demand from marketing professionals to better gauge their social media performance

12
See Appendix A.2 for graphic representing survey results.
13
TopRank – Online Marketing Blog
20
across multiple platforms. The metrics and tools used in social media analysis will be discussed
further in the next section.

3.6 The use of objectives, goal setting and metrics

If creating ROI measurements is a high priority as the previous study suggests, it is important to
look at the current methods and tools used for social media marketing. The first step is that
goals and objectives must be set, and then using different forms of metrics an evaluation can be
conducted (Peck, 2011).

It seems obvious that before setting out on any kind of marketing initiative you should set goals
for your campaign (Zarrella, 2010, p.221). Many authors share this view and highlight the
importance of goal setting (Smith, 2010; Rosales, N.d.; Marketers Annex, N.d.). Olivier
Blanchard points out the distinction that typically those companies that start by identifying ROI
requirements before launching a social media campaign fair better than their counterparts who
do not. A view also held by Birgfeld, (2010). Marketers Annex and other publications tend to
agree that clearly stating goals before a campaign can help avoid “extended development time,
additional cost, and poor performance” (Marketers Annex, N.d.). Setting goals and objectives
are integral to conducting performance appraisal. Most importantly, by creating measurable
objectives, it then becomes easier to understand which metrics can be used to gauge success
(Naslund, 2010).

The literature seems to divide the types of goals firms can set as either being monetary or
intangible in nature. Monetary, or financial, goals are much easier to classify. It is viewed as a
desire to generate more revenue or profit from their social media marketing (Ray, 2010).
However intangible goals encompass a much wider range. August Ray, writer and researcher
for Forrester, outlines a useful diagram to place goals:
 (Ray, 2010)

Here we can see that financial perspective relates to short term directly financial goals. The
other three quadrants to varying degrees relate more to intangible goals. A risk management
perspective is described by Ray as better positioning an organization to respond to attacks or
problems that affect reputation. Social media can offer an opportunity for brands to be more
responsive to customers and even improve products or services through monitoring and
interacting with online complaints and suggestions (eMarketer, 2011). The „Brand Perspective‟
ties in partly with risk management as it focuses on goals relating to improving customer
attitudes and views about a firms brand. Finally „Digital Perspective‟ is described by Ray as
enhancing a company‟s digital assets.

In contrast, Jim Sterne writes that all goals should fit into one of three business categories;
increasing revenue, lowering costs and improving customer satisfaction. He argues that any
activities that are not resulting in an improvement of any of these three goals are a waste of time
(Sterne, 2010, xxvii). It seems that in terms of the scope of ROI for social media, there is a
divide between strictly viewing it in monetary terms or also integrating in-direct financial
impacts.

22
In order to ascertain whether these goals have been met, marketers employ a variety of metrics.
A study conducted by marketingsherpa14 showed that the top three metrics used by marketers
were:

1. Visitors and sources of traffic

2. Network size in terms of followers, fans, members etc.

3. Quantity of commentary about your brand or product

(marketingsherpa.com, 2010)

Just looking at these three points, there is an array of tools and applications available to produce
metrics to measure these areas. One such tool is Google Analytics15, a popular system for
producing what many authors refer to as „eyeball‟ metrics. The software allows a web owner to
know how visitors found the site and how they interact with it (Plaza, 2009, p.3). It does this by
providing statistics such as the number of visitors, the average number of page per views per
visitor, average page duration, most requested pages, domain classes and referrers (Plaza, 2009,
p.3). There is a vast collection of metrics available for marketers going far beyond the few listed
previously (Berkowitz, 2009). There are also platform specific analytic tools such as
Tweetreach and Twitalyzer as well as aggregation tools like Social Mention that brings together
statistics from many different platforms 16 (Forbes, 2010).

Metrics have been criticized in the literature, being described as time-consuming, involving a
large amount of paperwork and confusing (Gattiker, 2010). It is argued that the large array of
metrics available can be a hindrance rather than a help and may cause marketers to be
overwhelmed (Worsham, 2010). Another criticism argues that if metrics are not tied to specific
business goals, they become meaningless (Sterne, 2010, p.4). But while the criticism seems
targeted at the misuse of metrics, they do not negate the potential they serve to achieving more
accurate performance appraisals.

If these metrics and tools are available to marketers, why does calculating ROI still pose such a
problem? Are the methods used with traditional marketing, briefly touched upon earlier, not
transferable to this new marketing medium?

It seems the answer to this question is; not entirely. In today‟s environment it seems that many
of the older methods “...used to measure the value of marketing media have been found to be
false, fuzzy, and inaccurate” (Harden & Heyman, 2011, p.2). Eve Orsburn agrees, describing

14
See appendix A for chart showing full results
15
The official definition of Web Analytics form the web Analytics Association: „Web Analytics is the
measurement, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing
Web usage” (WAA, 2008, p.3).
16
See Appendix A.4 – A.6 for image examples of the tools.
calculating the ROI of a PR event or customer visits to your business as “not exactly crystal
clear” (Orsburn, 2010, Locations 1431-41).The following section discusses the other difficulties
surrounding ROI for social media.

3.7 Difficulties in calculating ROI for Social Media

It appears that the problems highlighted in the literature revolve around three major issues
touched on earlier. Firstly that an organization does not establish social media goals, or that any
that are made have latent errors which then present themselves in the difficulty of calculating
ROI. Secondly, the revenue link within their social media campaign and sales is not clear. This
makes attributing revenue change even more difficult. And thirdly, that there is disagreement of
what ROI can actually be applied to.

3.7.1 The Scope of ROI

Looking at these issues in reverse order, the literature seems to show that there is some
disagreement about the scope of ROI when applied to social media marketing. For example
Jason Falls interviewed Katie Paine who discusses the non-monetary nature of social media
marketing. She reasons that in order to calculate ROI you must first define what the „R‟ is,
arguing that it could also be to lower employee turnover, increase influence or other non-
monetary returns (Falls, 2008) and other authors share a similar view (Ray, 2010; Peck, 2011).

Olivier Blanchard disagrees and categorizes these as „non-financial impacts‟ and strongly
advocates that in fact ROI can only concern the return on investment in terms of „actualized
dollars‟ directly attributed to the social media marketing activities. He goes on to say:

“For the purpose of ROI calculation, however, you want to work with
cold hard numbers. Not estimates, not potential, not yet-to-happen
transactions…”

(Blanchard, 2009)

He believes when trying to calculate ROI an error that is often made is that results derived from
the non-financial impacts are used to calculate ROI17. An example can be that metrics from a
social media campaign show that traffic to a company‟s site increase. Based on the average
spend per customer visit a revenue can be attributed. This methodology makes assumptions that
the increased traffic resulted in increased sales, and that the amount of revenue is an average of
online spending to traffic ratio. He explains that we may be able to assign estimated values to
people who visit a site, or the „influencers‟ in social media but they will be subjective at best.

17
Peter Kay also agrees in his presentation about Bath Ales (Kay, 2011, slides 15-21).
24
Interestingly Blanchard puts the use of ROI into the context of the person requesting it. He
mentions that when dealing with business executives they are not looking for you to “redefine
ROI” in terms of engagement or influence but to deal with it in terms of monetary return. In the
strictest sense of the definition of ROI, Blanchard‟s view that it must relate to actual money
earned from an investment appears to be valid.

Does this mean that non-financial impacts of social media marketing do not matter? That would
be difficult to justify as many (if not all) have some indirect link to revenue. Reducing
employee turnover can reduce costs, improve productivity etc. and John Sterne emphasizes the
point that the other side of the profit equation is cost18; that by lowering costs via customer
service or market research you can boost profits (Sterne, 2010, p7). Increasing brand awareness
can make conversions to sales later on easier for marketing campaigns. Rather it seems that
using them to calculate ROI creates difficulties. Dave Webb expresses concern that businesses
may miss opportunities because they may be unwilling to participate in activities that are
difficult to measure (Webb, 2008). It seems that the non-financial impacts should not be
ignored and most likely do have an impact on ROI. This debate highlights the potential
clarifications that could be made through the primary research to be conducted in this
dissertation.

3.7.2 Identifying the Revenue Link

The second point of issue mentioned was that the link between marketing activity and revenue
is not always easy to establish. The study reviewed earlier by Bazaarvoice showed it is a major
stumbling block. The survey showed that although in 2009 80% of CMO‟s expected to link
revenue to social media in the coming year, while the 2010 statistics showed that only 40% said
they achieved tying some percentage of revenue to their social efforts19. Sometimes a link can
be seen, as in the case for Bath Ales recent successful social media marketing campaign. Peter
Kay20 showed how an analysis of the company‟s online sales showed that the majority (over
60%) were generated from their online newsletter (Kay, 2011, slide 49). With this revenue link
identified, metrics of how to measure it, and more importantly goals and success criteria could
be prepared. However the linking of revenue will become even more difficult to establish if
non-financial impacts discussed earlier are to be included into ROI calculations.

3.7.3 Goals, objectives and Strategy

The final facet regarding goal setting was covered extensively in section 3.6 earlier. There is
clear agreement regarding their importance, but some differing views regarding how to apply
them correctly. What needs to be better understood is how to form goals that will facilitate the

18
As mentioned earlier it is one of his „Big Three Business Goals‟ – „Lower costs‟ (Sterne, 2010, p.5).
19
„CMOs on Social Marketing Plans for 2011‟ (Bazaarvoice, 2011)
20
Worked with the marketing team for Bath Ales to develop and integrate social media into their
business.
calculation of ROI, and can be incorporated into an overall strategy. Although the literature
seems to present these three major issues, there is also a lack of understanding how to link them
into a coherent ROI strategy. Richard Meyer points out that the benefits of social media are only
available to those who are able to integrate their social media strategy to their overall marketing
strategy (Meyer, 2010).

26
4. Discussion and Findings
The interviews for this dissertation played a key role for a number of reasons. Firstly, as
mentioned earlier, a lack of academic material has meant a reliance on many blogs which
needed balancing with specialist knowledge and clarification from some of the blog authors
themselves. Secondly, in order to better understand the methods of ROI, it was hoped that
approaching businesses and agencies specialising in social media would bring greater detail into
the best practices used during the process.

The questioning was aligned against the key areas highlighted at the end of the literature review
forming a list of themes around which this discussion is structured:

 The Scope of Social Media ROI

 How to link revenue

 The use of goals, objectives and strategy

 Using metrics to evaluate performance

The structure takes a top-down approach. That is by beginning with the aspects of identifying
the scope of ROI, developing goals and objectives, using metrics to assess performance and
finally dealing with the difficulties that presented themselves. It was hoped that by laying it out
in this way, a better understanding of the process as whole could be achieved.

4.1 What should the scope of social media ROI be?

This was discovered to be an area of some controversy in the literature, which has
unsurprisingly been mirrored in the interview results. It seemed that if you are talking
specifically about ROI then it has to be in terms of revenue gained because that is how ROI is
calculated. However, there is a valid argument that although many indirect impacts such as
increased brand awareness and influence must also have monetary benefits. The responses can
be split into three broad groupings. The first of which argued that there are many aspects of
return that are not directly linked to revenue or sales as Jason Falls21, responsible for the Social
Media Explorer blog, explains:

“Sometimes it‟s money. Sometimes it‟s awareness. Sometimes it is happy

customers. Sometimes it is influence. Some of those don‟t have
appropriate cells on a spreadsheet.”

21
To read more about the interviewee backgrounds, refer to Appendix B
Social Media marketer and blogger Mike McGrail echoes a similar view pointing out that being
“too tied up in the bottom line” can be problematic. While instead advocating that if you are
conducting your social media campaigns well you will see the bottom line improving positively.
Jacquie McCarnan, owner of Social Media – Canada, also strongly stated that the focus on
money is a negative one and those organisations entering social media to increase sales:

“…probably should not be using social media to do that simply because

any SM campaign that does not put the client/customer first is doomed.
(Insert thunder and lightning effects here :)”

The literature clearly showed a distinction with how the scope of ROI can be viewed. These
interviewees seemed to share similar views to the authors Paine, Ray and Peck22. Conversely
another view presented by some interviewees was that ROI for social media had to be about
money earned because what is the point of engaging in it if you cannot increase wealth? This
was the strictly monetary view discussed by Olivier Blanchard in the literature review. This
point is made quite succinctly by Colin Boyd, Director of Boyd Digital:

“I do he doesn‟t! I think that if you‟re not making money, that money

should be spent elsewhere because sales come first.”

He is referring to his associate Grant Ruxton, partner at Boyd Digital, who argues that the scope
of ROI is company specific, depending on their needs and requirements:

“Yes with certain clients I would never give them the, oh but you‟re
getting your engagement and brand chat because it‟s not what they are
talking to us for.”

He argues that the scope may be dependent on the requirements an organisation sets out for its
social media marketing. Grant goes further explaining how for heavily branded products it is
their brand value that allows them to have much higher margins:

“Because ultimately, two t-shirts, the branded one will sell for forty
pounds the exact same t-shirt without the brand name sells for ten pounds.
Why is that worth more?”

In terms of social media, he attributes the increased value to “buzz on Facebook” and “having
hundreds of thousands of fans” thus justifying a higher price. So while social media might not
represent an actual sales channel for such a company, it allows them to increase the value of
their product. If, then, it is not used primarily as a sales channel where ROI could more easily

22
See „The Scope of ROI‟ Section 3.7.1
28
be linked to online sales, it can be used as a branding channel; affecting sales and profits in a
different way. However Olivier Blanchard seemed to view ROI as always relating to “actualised
revenue” and considering the non-financial impacts important, but measured separately.

Julie Tait from Culture Sparks notes how the monetary return aspect is crucial for them despite
operating in the public sector. They work with various organisations involved in the arts and try
and help promote their services and improve their performance partly through the use of social
media. Their funding is generally sourced from the public sector. She explains that
fundamentally their business is still linked to sales:

“…what the bottom line is if I don‟t have anything in the box office, don‟t
have anyone sitting in the seats then I don‟t have revenue. If I don‟t have
revenue then I don‟t get funding.”

It would then seem, in terms of securing funding, ROI for Culture Sparks must include
increasing of revenue. However, she also goes on to explain that they are in the “audience
business” and that their real interest in social media is in how it can increase “…reach and
participation and engagement…” which are far less tangible goals than monetary return.

The interviews thus highlighted that the debate found in the literature is reflected in the views of
current social media marketing practitioners. However all seemed to agree that the monetary
aspect of ROI is very important, but had different views when it came to linking intangible, and
perhaps indirectly financial, impacts to the ROI equation. This is why the next sectioning
attempted to discover how the scope of ROI fits into specific goals and objectives and
marketing strategy as a whole.

4.2 Goals, objectives and strategy

The literature clearly showed that there was agreement on the importance of goal setting which
is hardly a surprising view to hold. That is why the questioning for the interviews was designed
to understand how to set goals to improve performance and thus better calculate ROI for social
media.

The whole topic of goals and objectives ties back to forming a strategy. This view was echoed
in all interviewees responses. Mike McGrail believes that social media marketing is just another
marketing channel:

“…people talk about having a social media strategy when what you really
need to have is a digital strategy that incorporates social media.”

He is referring to a strategy that incorporates all digital forms of marketing, such as search
engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click advertising and affiliate advertising. Gary Ennis, the
Managing Director and founder of NS Design, works with companies on a one-to-one basis to
work on a strategy:

“...crucial to that strategy is to find the objectives. You know why are we
doing it here, is it just to raise awareness of the company, or is it
something specific your looking to sell more of something, new markets
your looking to move into, or you want a different share of your audience
demographic, whatever, what is the reason behind it. And that reason
helps structure a lot of the „what we do‟ rather than just ok let‟s jump into
social media and have fun, which they do anyway but you know you need
to measure it in order to quantify it so”

Mike McGrail argues that goals must “relate back to the key needs of your business”. Greg
Ruxton from Boyd Digital offers a similar view, stating that when they are approached by
companies wishing to develop a social media marketing strategy they first work to find what the
company wants to achieve from social media. Perhaps due to the fact that social media
marketing is still a relatively new field Greg explains that “most of these people are a bit
unsure” when it comes to forming goals and that they sometimes “…really need to tease out
their needs and what they want to achieve or where they see things going”.

Jason Falls boiled down what purposes social media marketing can serve (and hence what goals
should be assigned) into six points:

“Social media marketing can serve about six purposes for an

organization. 1. Enhance Branding and Awareness 2. Protect the Brand's
Reputation 3. Build Community/Loyalty 4. Facilitate Customer Service 5.
Compliment Research and Development and 6. Drive Sales/Leads.”

Branding related goals seem to be important and came up frequently during the discussions.
Jacquie McCarnan agrees that with social media marketing “It's far more powerful as a brand
builder but many companies fail to recognize that”. This fits well with the diagram produced by
Forrester23 showing the four areas social media goals, with „brand perspective‟ being one of
them. Also goals regarding building customer loyalty and facilitating customer service can
reduce an organisation‟s costs. This represents a different driver than revenue for the ROI
equation. Since ROI is calculated with the costs in mind, cost savings must then also have an

23
See „The use of objectives, goal setting and metrics‟ Section 3.6
30
effect of producing a more positive ROI. This echoes the view of Jim Sterne‟s book discussed
earlier whereby the reduction in costs will increase profits and hence improve ROI24.

A common trend developing from the interviews is that driving sales is not the only, or most
important, goal that can be set for social media marketing. Many interviewees contrasted social
media from the “push marketing” of traditional methods and believed because of the two-way
nature of social media non-financial impacts such as engagement and influence play a relatively
more important role. But this raises the question of how such goals, which are not directly
related to sales, can be incorporated into calculating ROI.

4.3 The use of metrics in calculating ROI

As discussed in the literature review, there is a wide array of metrics available to try and help
quantify social media marketing efforts. In Amber Naslund‟s blog post25 she believed that by
creating measurable objectives it becomes easier to understand which metrics can be used. The
interview process was intended to investigate whether measurable objectives, as described in the
previous chapter, equate to easier measuring and metric use. The responses gathered regarding
what type of metrics interviewees used or advocated highlighted two important points. Firstly
that the use of metrics to monitor statistics by itself is not a useful practice and that to gain value
they must be linked to objectives or goals. Secondly that social change regarding peoples
buying behaviour online could prove to make the process of measuring direct sales easier in the
future.

Gary Ennis highlights that measuring or monitoring without relating to objectives or key
performance indicators does not aide in ROI calculation:

“If they were doing general monitoring, we got mentioned 50 times this
week on Twitter, big deal you know, has it actually achieved anything it
was meant to achieve?”

Mike Mcgrail agreed with this reasoning, and describes the process of taking online metrics and
making them mean something when you sit with company executives:

“Having these figures behind you which are easy to obtain if you‟re
visiting the right analytic steps can be a massive weapon and it can
change their perception of it as a marketing channel. Instead of just
saying we have 10,000 followers on Facebook”

24
See „Difficulties in calculating ROI‟ Section 3.7
25
See „The use of objectives, goal setting and metrics‟ Section 3.6
This seems to indicate that whatever the metrics used, they need to have meaning in relation to
stated objectives. Mike McGrail gives a good example of a blog, where content is produced
with what he describes as “a call to action”:

“it could be click here to buy this product, you know, and get a 30%
discount, and then by charting all that we can say this is what the blog is
doing”

This type of method was a popular one in the interview answers especially in the responses
from Boyd Digital and NS Design. It involves the use of link tracking to monitor where traffic
flows and analysing what happens when traffic is directed. However Gary Ennis does point out
that monitoring traffic on its own does not provide much insight:

“sending the traffic is not enough, that‟s when clever integration with
analytics can help because then you can monitor what they are doing on
the site and actually, see if they are going to do what you want them to do.
And if the objective is to sell stuff, which it can be, have they actually done
that?”

This involves finding the origin of a website visitor (e.g. did they come via a link posted on the
company Twitter page?) and what actions they took once arriving at your website. This can
include a wide array of actions, such as placing an order or an enquiry. During the interview
with Boyd Digital the question was asked regarding how they used metrics to track web traffic
from social media platforms onto a client‟s site they Colin Boyd said:

“Yeah Bit.ly or UTM tracking so it goes into Google Analytics or your

package analyser, social media traffic, and you just bundle up all your
social media tracking and say right, what did they buy and then you can
analyse it further. Did social media click or transact more or less than the
average transaction?”

This, then, seems to be a common approach by the interviewees. Firstly, metrics are used to
ascertain the origins and volume of traffic that is being driven from or to their social media
platforms. The behaviour of site visitors is analysed in terms of their actions and how those
relate to the goals of the campaign. However, it is worth noting that conversion rates and
average transactions from traffic driven from social media platforms is also affected by the
standard of the selling channel they are being directed to. This could mean that a poorly
designed website is resulting in lower conversion rates, rather than the fault lying with the
quality of traffic being driven there.

32
4.4 Main difficulties in calculating ROI
In terms of difficulties the interviewees all seemed to highlight that the process is not
straightforward or simple.

The previous section showed that organisations have the ability to use metrics to track and
monitor how social media platforms are driving sales on their websites. However an obvious
point of objection could be that this may be a method available to those organisations that sell
products online, but how do bricks-and-mortar stores measure the ROI of social media
marketing?

This aspect was addressed by Mike McGrail who said that:

“unless you are an online business for example then you‟re not
necessarily going to be able to track your sales off the back of it unless
you‟re doing vouchers and „show me your phone‟26 and that type of
thing.”

This is a serious problem to any company that does not sell online and although Mike offers
some workarounds they involve discounting and may not be applicable to many companies. The
methods for tracking direct sales from social media marketing are available, but are little use for
a firm that does not have an online channel for its goods or services.

However there are also difficulties with online retailers in assigning direct revenue. Greg
Ruxton believes that in terms of proving direct sales it is still difficult. He does however
highlight a growing trend that should make this become easier for companies to do:

“that‟s probably going to change to a degree with the likes of Asus

putting all their stock online…because you can buy directly from
Facebook now. And there are lots of little things like that happening. You
can put on your pages buy now tabs and you can do almost anything
within a tab. The technology is there to enable people to buy from
Facebook, the social thing is moving towards, yeah that‟s ok, and it‟s fine
to buy something on Facebook, that‟s the norm.”

The increased integration of selling on social media platforms such as the ones mentioned above
will mean that tracking becomes even easier. With this system sales made on an organisation‟s
social media platform can be directly attributed to it. This can be contrasted with the scenario of
a customer who because of your social media marketing initiatives wants to purchase your

26
An example of this is an iPhone app called VoucherCloud, which allows users to purchase discount
vouchers and then display the code to the business. See Appendix A.3 for image (Charlton, 2010).
product, however if they simply search for your organisations website to make a purchase, it is
difficult to directly attribute that sale to social media. In fact Colin Boyd argues that:

“If they clicked through Google, that wasn‟t a social media sale. They
might have used Google to find you but they still used Google. So that
filters back to SEO.”

This is a fair point to make, and would similarly apply to any other media efforts made by the
company. If their TV advertising was driving sales to their online page, these similarly could
not be included as social media ROI. Mike McGrail admits that social media ROI is a difficult
thing to prove, stating that:

“It‟s a valid argument that social media ROI is hard to prove, at a

fundamental level it‟s a valid argument, but, overall there is so much
more you can prove with social and digital media compared to in
traditional push markets”

This ties into one last difficulty discussed in the interviews, regarding the lack of standard
practice for social media ROI, and how methods used for traditional marketing were not
necessarily appropriate or transferable. This was hinted at in Mr McGrails previous quote and
he goes on to explain how examples of traditional media such as outdoor billboards are “the
hardest things to prove ROI on” and that “it‟s almost impossible”. This was touched upon in the
literature review regarding traditional media ROI methods. Gary Ennis agrees contrasting the
billboard example, where you have very little idea how many people looked at it, with
marketing on social media platforms where you can get highly accurate figures for views. So it
seems that despite these difficulties there is the potential for social media to better and more
accurately calculate ROI, especially when compared to the methods used with more traditional
marketing channels.

34
5. Conclusion
The clearest result from the research is that there is no standard method for calculating ROI in
social media marketing. This is because establishing ROI depends to some extent on whether or
not an organisation directly sells through online channels. It also depends on their use of
discounting/promotional campaigns in social media as opposed to a content-focused
engagement approach. Though these and other variables mean that the specific details will be
different for each circumstance, the research showed that the successful calculation of ROI
revolves around three main areas, as follows.

5.1 Best Practice

The first of these is the ability to create goals and objectives that have been designed with
performance measurement in mind. This entails using standard best practice principles
regarding goal setting as well as incorporating specific online assessment methods. Though both
the primary and secondary research showed that there was disagreement regarding what entails
the „return‟ aspect of social media marketing, there is agreement that there is a return. Thus
understanding what return an organisation wishes to achieve and translating that into goals and
objectives is crucial.

Second, with these goals and objectives in mind, it is important to decide the scope of ROI as it
applies to the business situation. If the goals are sales oriented, then the ROI is in terms of
revenue earned. If the goals are brand related, revenue is still the measure of ROI, however the
performance equation now needs to include an appraisal of some more indirect financial goals
such as reach, influence and branding as well as understanding how these affect sales.

Thirdly, understanding how to use the many different metrics available to monitor and assess
the performance of social media marketing efforts against said goals and objectives. Most
importantly is designing the social media marketing campaign to make maximum use of online
analysis tools. Campaigns that are able to more fully integrate with the tracking and analytics
metrics will be able to more clearly link and measure key performance indicators.

5.2 Difficulties
However the research also concluded that there are a number of difficulties regarding the
calculation of social media ROI. It was found that many of these difficulties were also present in
traditional media ROI methods. Although you may be able to acquire information regarding
how many people were exposed to a billboard or TV advertisement, it is very difficult, and in
some cases impossible, to directly link a sale to these marketing channels. It seems that because
of the digital nature of social media, it has the potential to do much more in terms of
measurement than traditional forms of marketing.
It could also be assumed that, with time, trends will develop that become accepted as justifying
a correlation between, say, social media interaction levels and sales. This would eventually
become similar to the way in which television „impressions‟ are accepted as having some
correlation to sales. Perhaps, since social media is a relatively new medium, it has not yet
earned such „acceptance‟ when compared to the more established marketing media.

The biggest difficulty seemed to be regarding how indirect financial impacts, such as increasing
brand awareness, can be included into ROI calculation. The method of using metrics and
analytics to assign direct sales is difficult to apply to brand awareness. Additionally, though
there may be tools and software that can measure intangibles such as reach and sentiment, it is
not clear how to tie in metrics of these figures into increased sales or ROI in general. It raises
the question: if no link can be made from such metrics to revenue, can they be included in the
ROI equation? This is not negating the importance of such objectives, but suggesting that their
measurement becomes a form of performance appraisal outside of the specific realm of ROI.

5.3 Further Research

These difficulties highlight areas where further research is required. There is the need to know
how, in both practical and theoretical terms, intangible goals such as increasing brand
awareness, improving sentiment, and reach impact the bottom line. The reality is that although
it may be difficult, the value of pursuing such objectives must be in some way justified in
financial terms in order to justify its use.

As mentioned in the methodology, if more time was available, it may have been valuable to
include clients of social media marketing companies along with independent businesses
undertaking such marketing campaigns of their own accord. It would also be possible to employ
a case study approach investigating how an organisation plans, implements and measures a
social media marketing campaign. This would help provide more detail into specifics of
measurement techniques, goal forming, and strategy than was possible in the limited interviews
carried out in this dissertation.

36
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APPENDIX A – Charts and Graphics

A1.

(Solis, 2010, p.34-35)

A.2

A.3

(Charlton, 2010)

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A.4

A. 5
A.6

Images A.4 – A.6 sourced from thesocialpenguinblog.com (Forbes, 2010)

44
APPENDIX B –Interviewee Information

In person Interviews:

Mike McGrail: Senior Digital Account manager at The BIG Partnership. Previously
digital marketing consultant at Standard Life, the Account Manager at Perfect Storm
Digital and the Marketing Manager at The Skinny Magazine.

Colin Boyd: Managing Director at Boyd Digital. Previously was the CEO at Logan Car
Hire, the Online Marketing Manager at Nation1 and co-founder of iwanttobook.com

Grant Ruxton: Partner at Boyd Digital. Previously Marketing and Digital Manager at
tilllate.com, and the Project Manager at Triple One Group – Digital and Advertising
Agency.

Gary Ennis: Founder and Managing Director of NS Designs Ltd. Previously joined
ABACUS (The Architecture and Building Aids Computer Unit Strathclyde) where he
led a wide range of projects.

Julie Tait: Currently the Director at Culture Sparks. Was previously on the Board of
Directors at Central College, Glasgow, as well as The Booth Ticketing Agency.

Email Interviews:

Jason Falls: Currently the person responsible at Exploring Social Media and is also the
Principal at Social Media Explorer LLC.

Jacquie McCarnan: Professional Social Media Manager and Network Marketer,

currently owner of Social Media – Canada.
APPENDIX C – Interviews

C.1 Interview with Mike McGrail

R: Hi, Mike, if you could just tell me a little about your background and what you do?

M: I did Marketing at Napier Uni in Edinburgh and I graduated in 2005, and my first job from
uni was at a small tourism specific marketing agency, we were not actually doing anything
digital at all. I started thinking, wait a minute there must be more you can do with the websites
etc etc. I stayed there for a year and learnt a lot from it and then I was the marketing manager at
the Skinny Magazine in its first year which was crazy and fun, and again the website to them
was just a placeholder for information but I said we can actually start driving some revenue off
this though ads etc etc. I left that and went overseas for a year just travelling Australia, New
Zealand, and stuff and then it was at the point when I came back I got my first fully digital role
at a company called Perfect Storm Digital and that was full digital strategies. So at that point in
time I was using MySpace and Bebo for social media stuff, Facebook was around but it wasn‟t,
you know, they didn‟t even have pages or anything. I was using Twitter on a personal level but
not many brands were using it. But that was SEO, PPC, creation of online ads, web analytics the
full shebang for brands like SemiChem, and fairly large Scottish businesses.

And then I went client side as they call it, so Standard Life for pretty much a year as one of the
key members of their digital team and one of my key tasks was to try and sell social media to
the board. So this business is hundreds of years old who sell life insurance policy and all that
type of thing and they had a sort of massive fear of social media. So I brought a team together
from across the company, started, again I took every department, HR PR Marketing sales guys
and said, right what do guys feel is lacking from your business offering. Chartered all that and
pulled it all together, turned that into something I could tell them this is what we could be doing
with this part of the social web. For you guys. Felt I have done my job there they have started,
they launched a Facebook page and stuff last week, which was great. Then and opportunity
came to me to join the big partnership and basically build a social media and digital marketing
team in there. They had been doing digital marketing for about ten years but I have been helping
them construct the social media side of it and currently already dealing with one of the biggest
whisky brands in the world, people like the NHS, down to small local businesses.

That‟s my kind of background, and then there‟s the Social Penguin which is a pretty well
regarded blog, though I can‟t write anything at the moment because I‟m so busy. But it got
nominated for a big reward recently and its becoming more and more popular so I guess that‟s
kind of me in a nutshell!

Busy man, but loving it. Your question got me thinking a lot about ROI and your subject
because it‟s completely feasible to completely tell people what the ROI could be, but the
fundamental things to get over are A) educating people about how social media works, and what
people want from it and B) to take that plunge and anyone who says they will get social media
right the first time is lying, and agencies will make mistakes businesses will make mistakes. But
when the mistake is made there has to be the processes and the background and it‟s a constant
learning curve. I think in that lecture I had that diagram and I wrote it goes from the research to
all the stages and then to evaluation, with it being a constant thing. And the agencies that are
not doing it well or the businesses who aren‟t doing it well just stick with the same thing and
what you end up with is going back to the push market days where it is we have got the same
46
message and we will just put them out there. Licking your finger and sticking it in the air type
of thing.

R: Alright can I take it back to why is social media marketing important to companies in this
day and age?

M: I guess it‟s important to remember that social media is just another marketing channel so
people talk about having a social media strategy when what you really need to have is a digital
strategy that incorporates social media. But, the key thing for me is it‟s so important that,
people, or your customers, prospects now expect to be able to communicate with you in the
social media networks. So whether you‟re talking about Twitter, Facebook or you might have a
blog with people commenting on that. So you see it as a customer service channel and if they
aren‟t able to get in touch with you via that, they are going to get a bit hacked off. So it‟s pure
communication as opposed to pushing things down people‟s throats.

R: Well more traditional marketing media like TV advertising, is one way communication so
it‟s quite a shift when compared to social media.

M: Exactly, it gives you the opportunity to, like, start a conversation. So for example, Avia
Systems who do software and hardware solutions for massive multinational companies, they
have managed in one Tweet they sent out to generate 250,000 Dollars in a sale. They were using
all the listening tools and advanced search and they saw a guy in the States who was talking
about a new phone system and coms systems for his office but he is struggling to find anything
or anyone who he has found very useful. So they just approached him on Twitter and said „Look
we know you‟re interested in this, how can we help?‟ and then they built up that relationship
with a few tweets, then a phone call, and then the guy, well they sent one of their specialists out,
and I think between two or three weeks it was converted to a sale. So there is massive financial
return on investment for probably two three four hours of somebodies time initially. But if they
weren‟t within that social media space, they wouldn‟t have known that conversation was
happening.

R: They wouldn‟t have had that opportunity.

M: All they would have had is their traditional channels of, maybe getting an email or, a phone
call, or their sales guys going out to seminars and that type of thing. So I think fundamentally,
it‟s the fact that it gives you the opportunity to open yourself up and almost be A) an
information source but also seek opportunity to basically get leads for your business. That‟s
what it is at the end of the day.

R: So it definitely seems to be a disadvantage to not incorporate any of this in your marketing

strategy?

M: One thing I always ask, you know I deal with companies from every sector you can imagine
and every size. One thing we always ask when somebody approaches us for a social media and
digital advice is why do you want to be there? So they might come and say oh Mike we really
want to be on Twitter, we want to be on Facebook, we want a blog, and then we say well you
know are your customers, or potential customers actually using those networks or what?
Because social media has been around for a long long time I mean forums online are social
media, eBay is social media, Amazon is social media because of the reviews, but say your fairly
niche, like we do work for a company that galvanizes bits of metal and you don‟t think there is
a story there but there is actually some good content , the fact of the matter is the people that
might use their services are really old school, a lot of the are really old engineers from the old
school so they are not using Twitter or looking for clients on Facebook or even LinkedIn. But
what they are, are members of these old forums. So it‟s how do we go and get involved in those
forums but yeah I mean there is a solution for pretty much every business, I‟m confident in
saying that but you have to make sure you‟re a) doing for the right reasons and B) going to the
right places.

R: Yeah. I‟ve read a few articles recently that were saying that a lot of companies in B2B
businesses find it difficult to think how are we going to use Facebook, Twitter, all these
platforms, if our customers are just other businesses. Is it a bigger challenge?

M: It‟s different for B2B purely because it is a longer process of attraction to sales. But one of
the key things for a B2B business is to be able to show their expertise and their thought
leadership. So for example if you are the technical director of a software company, you need to
be looking to go into the B2B spaces online and looking for opportunities to respond to queries,
questions to help people out a little bit or for example writing a blog on hot industry topics. So
say there is management consultant selling their professional services, so all their business is on
a B2B basis so they might come to the Beanscene chain and say so look guys are you getting
the best efficiency from your staff? So what you would be looking to do is write a lot of articles
around the key areas of your business and keeping them fresh, so that shows you know what
you‟re talking about but your also helping people out a little bit and then they will come back to
you and remember you for that. With B2B the basic rules are the same, you know, we won‟t
just push things out there, don‟t be too spamy, be respectful and all that type of thing but at the
end of the day you know if you‟re a Starbucks and your B2C all your trying to do is push units
of coffee and its dead easy “oh I want a cup of coffee I‟ve been chatting to Starbucks or seen
good content from Starbucks online yeah I will give that a go. Whereas B2B is a market with a
much longer kind of journey and it‟s really about building those business relationships. It like
you and I going to a networking event and leaving with somebodies card that‟s how it used to
happen, and then if I wanted to follow up that lead I might phone and say John it was great to
meet you and such. But now it‟s a case of you need online social content to say, „hey John why
don‟t you check out this blog‟ because he said to me when we were out and about „I have real
issues with the efficiency of my staff‟ so I go back to my business and write a blog post about
efficiency of staff related to his industry and then follow up saying check this out, it might help
you. Instant relationship is born. Instead of sending them something through the mail or telling
the what you do you give them a tailored piece of content, so it‟s for consumers social media
isn‟t easy but getting something of the back of B2B can be a lot harder.

R: When companies want to start a social media marketing campaign, what are some of the
typical goals that they will try to achieve? Monetary and intangible?

M: I guess brand awareness and awareness of your business or services is key but most people
will come to you first up saying that I want to make more money, or want to reduce
my…basically the top two things that people say is, I want loads of followers on Twitter, I want
millions of fans on Facebook and I just want everyone to be talking about my business. Which
is great but what if you have 10,000 people following you on Twitter, and only 0.5% of them
ever interact with the stuff you say you‟re better having a thousand people who are highly
engaged with you. But here‟s a good one, a good potential outcome of any social media is
reducing customer service costs for example, so well we might have a call centre with twelve
48
people in it but over half of those calls are not being resolved in the timescale we want them to
be and then the next day we have to phone them back and it take so long. But opening up
Twitter channels and that type of thing people want and expect quick service through that. So if
you can have your people who are on their phone use their downtime, because the phones are
not always ringing so what does a call centre worker do in that time, they can be monitoring
Twitter and taking Twitter queries and trying to resolve the issues or trying to help out a person
. I‟ve gone a bit off topic here, what was the question?

R: just on what are the goals and objectives companies are trying to achieve, but it‟s relevant
because it‟s one of the goals companies can make.

M: so yes, increase revenues, reduce operating costs, increase brand awareness, and another
really important one is product development. So say you are the maker of that lemonade over
there and you have been making the lemonade for 30, 40, 50 years and you have never changed
the recipe, and you notice that your sales are tailing off. You are like oh no is there a competitor
hammering me in the market or is the product not as good as it used to be. If you have a well
established social media strategy in place with people who engage and listen to you, you can go
to them and say listen guys what‟s up with our product? Or look, here is a new logo that we are
going to put on our store, what do you guys think of it? And if they say no we don‟t like it, then
you change it because these are the people involved with your brand are putting the money over
your counter at the end of the day. And a perfect example is GAP, who didn‟t ask their fans,
you know 100‟s of millions of them across the globe, didn‟t ask their fans about their rebrand
and put out this horrific logo and the backlash on Twitter was unbelievable, and they reverted to
their original logo. Whereas is they had just asked people in the first place here are five options
pick the best one, that‟s it, it‟s all you need to do. And it doesn‟t cost you a lot of money.

R: It benefits them, and just further engages with their customers.

M: They feel like they are part of your business and that is one of the key things so if you set up
a Facebook page you have to incentivise to get people on there, if you are just on Facebook
saying hey give us a like and we will send you some links now and again you‟re not going to
get long term engagement. At the same time it‟s a good idea to start with a discount, say you are
a coffee shop „come in and get a free Danish with your coffee‟ so you might hook them with
that initially, but you have got them there so at that point you have got to start building the
relationship. So Addidas for example they will very rarely do any discounts but what they will
do is allow their Facebook fans to be the first fans to see their new autumn range or whatever so
they put the photos on there and they are the first people to see then all of a sudden, I haven‟t
looked at it in a while, but there are millions of people on it as far as I can remember and all
they have to do is click like on one of those tracksuits and their 500 friends see it and instead of
sending brochures out in the mail which people will probably not show to their friends and is
expensive they are going there you go guys this is what you get for being friends with us on
Facebook. So it‟s just giving that little bit extra. And again that‟s cost effective, all that takes is
somebody to digitise these images and put them out on Facebook.

R: Whereas a Facebook page like Pizza Hut just puts discounts and offers, this kind of thing
with very little engagement at all.

M: Which is fine, but that‟s eating away at your sales margins and also if Dominoes starts
undercutting your discounts they will be gone, off to dominoes, so give people the chance to
create the new signature pizza at Pizza Hut again they feel part of something, they are creating a
product for you and appreciate being asked their opinion. There are so many overall aims for it
but the key ones are relationship building, awareness of your brand, company or service, and
yeah ultimately either making more money or saving more money.

R: Is the importance of ROI in the industry exaggerated?

M: It‟s not exaggerated because it‟s obviously highly important, but if you only focus on the
monetary aspects of it it‟s incredibly hard for us to prove the ROI upfront or project the ROI for
something. We go in and say those key aims we were talking about there, do you think this will
help you reduce your customer service cost, do you think this will help you enter a new territory
in Europe or whatever, then we go away and build up key metrics, how will we prove those
ROI‟s, so is it a number of retweets, is it an awareness in a certain country etc etc. The
importance of it isn‟t overblown, but the problem is trying to educate people that it isn‟t just
about the bottom line. For example if you compare it to like pay-per-click advertising on
Google, you are spending the money on that, you absolutely want people to be clicking on to
your site from that link on Google and if they send you an enquiry or a question about their
product and then go off and buy a product you ROI on that 30p for that click are a hot lead or a
sale, dead easy to prove, but can‟t necessarily prove the overall feeling a certain group of the
population have towards your business.

R: Because you can have this engagement online with customers and then they can go out and
buy your products but not directly through the social media channels.

M: Exactly, exactly,

R: There isn‟t that concrete link. There is the word of mouth connection as well, with people
very active about your brand online also spreading that offline.

M; That‟s it, it‟s basically online word of mouth. If somebody thinks a product is crap they will
tell ten people where they will only tell one or two people if it‟s good. But if you can give them
the space and place online to go and do that it‟s fantastic. I mean Dell is a great example they
have sold over, this is an old stat but, three million pounds worth of laptops

R: I have read about that.

M: just through their Dell outlet. And all that was were quotes that were specific to Twitter, but
they put them on Twitter and then somebody takes that quote and puts it on their Facebook or
their blog and then Boom. Now that‟s fine, that‟s an example of just pure voucher driven social
media but at the same time, and they have had this for a number of years now, the Dell idea
store on their site, any dell user can go on there and request features or ask questions give them
product improvement ideas. So they are getting that engagement but also saving money which
is absolutely key. But to not be able to go into, from my point of view as an agency, my point to
not be able to go in and sit with somebody and try and turn their thinking about ROI as a major
issue we need to be confident in what we are saying, because its true but you know when you go
into the guys who are mid -50s, they just want the bottom line,

R: Yeah

M: figure it‟s very difficult. One the key things is obviously web analytics so it could just be as
easy as saying you know here‟s a target saying we will increase web traffic to your product base
and then we can easily prove that Twitter, Facebook, blog every other social media thing, video,
images, we can say all this came off the back of that and that‟s important its where the whole
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digital aspect comes in to it so. If you‟re doing an online banner ad, instead of driving people
necessarily to the product page why don‟t you set up a Facebook connect so they can click a
button within that add and go through to your page and as soon as they are on that page you ask
them to like you in order to receive something and they click that like button and bang that
online word of mouth goes. Then you have another set of ads that are leading through to product
sites and you can compare and contrast. I‟m doing some Facebook ads just now for a new
entertainment venue and half the budget is heading off to the website and half the budget is
going to Facebook. With their Facebook ads that lead to the website people will get like 3
pound of entry for the first night, but if they go through to Facebook they get a chance to join a
club that will give them increased bonuses over time for being loyal, so that‟s just a comparison
we are trying to do for the client to show them that the power of the Facebook phenomenon as
opposed to just giving them a one off discount.

R: Speaking of analytics, what are current examples, and are there any standards involving the
use of metrics for calculating ROI?

M: Well, there is almost kind of a channel or network specific metrics so for example they tend
to be about actions on the pages so if you take a Facebook page for example it‟s the number of
likes or fans or number of comments, numbers of post likes, number of people that have spread
that. But what we tend to do is like socialmention.com which I think I showed in that lecture,
that‟s a free and quite amazing tool, so we can type in our brand name and search the whole
social space and it will show us all the places people have been talking about us. The key
metrics are sentiments, so for all the mentions that happen in the social media space, regardless
of where, what‟s the balance of good vs. negative? Say you are at the ratio of 10 positive to 1
negative then that‟s great but if you are like 4-3, 3-2 then you have got a problem as there is
almost as many people unsatisfied as there are satisfied. So sentiment is one of the key ones,
then there is reach, so how far is your message spreading, and the other two within the social
mention are loyalty, telling you how if there are people out there constantly talking about you,
you can identify those but they are the kind of, they change from, because we are all obviously
using different online programs and software so they can change the sentiment, passion and
reach so they can kind of three key ones.

R: These are kind of labelled as social media influence right?

M: Exactly, then you have things like Klout which tells you somebodies social media influence
but is kind of wishy washy. If you go on to klout.com search for I don‟t know Mike McGrail, it
will tell you my online influence but it uses a number of metrics so it will look at my followers
on Twitter, it will look at the number of conversations I have engaged in, the number of links I
have shared that have gone on and been clicked for example, you can do that for brands as well.
But a brand with a million followers is going to have a high Klout regardless it does not actually
mean they are engaging but then each network like I said so you‟ve got different sets of metrics
for Twitter Facebook and blogs are really important so if we have this blog how long are people
spending on the page, on the site, are they coming in and then disappearing ten seconds later
because they are not interested, are the clicking the calls to action within a blog post. So
whenever we write a blog post, it‟s nice to have a nice bit of content but in order to gauge it and
prove that the investment is working we need people to be taking an action so that could be
click here to be our contact on this page on a really basic level, click here to send us an email to
ask about our product, it could be click here to buy this product, you know 30% discount, and
then by charting all that we can say this is what the blog is doing, but it‟s very easy for people to
get bogged down in the numbers…5000 followers 2000 likes and all that type of thing.
R: In terms of the difficulties in calculating ROI, I saw a presentation from a guy called
NotFromBolton, and he did work for Bath Ales, and he found the metric to use was that sales
were driven mainly through subscribers of their weekly newsletter, so then once you find that
out he knew that was the metric to base performance on, how many subscribers you get. Is there
difficulty in ascertaining what the right metric or path is to best gauge performance?

M: Yeah it has to relate to their overall, you know what outcomes they want, social strategy.
One of the great things about email marketing is that you know how many people you are
sending that to, because it‟s part of your database, they you can know how many people opened
and clicked. Now a lot of these are the same metrics you would use for a blog strategy for
example, and that‟s one of the corner stones of any social media strategy before you even say a
word out there in the space is that you have to work out exactly what the key ROI for that
business specifically is, but if you have a benchmark like that it makes it a hell of a lot easier to
get people on side. And what we are finding is that the problem is a lot of businesses don‟t have
a database that‟s up to date so when you go out there and start a blog ideally you would have a
list of people you would send that to and get initial interest. When you‟re starting from scratch,
it can be very difficult. Then you have the question of email vs. social media, how can you
integrate the two. See if you are emailing somebody about your new squash racket but they
have already been chatting to one of your people on Twitter about that squash racket and then
you hit them with a cold email they will be like these guys don‟t know me.

R: Mixed Signals.

M: yeah missed signals. It seems you need to streamline where you going, so if Twitter isn‟t
going to work for you then focus on Facebook. The question about which Facebook thing to use
should now be always using a page, so you can never be using a personal profile it‟s against the
Facebook rules. You should be setting up a page for anything like a band but at the same time
the groups they are for more like charities and things like that and non-profit organisations or
setting up a protest group. The page is the most shareable kind of outlet but one of the key
things, and this is really important, is that people say yeah I‟ve got 20,000 people on my
Facebook and 5000 people on my Twitter, if I need to get in touch with them I can do it there.
What if Twitter goes bust? What if Facebook goes bust? Ok highly unlikely, but Facebook
change their access rights all the time. So one of the key things is taking those people from
Facebook and Twitter and getting them into a database you own that you can then email, you‟ve
got that and that‟s your data, as long as they have opted in to receive messages from you so but
in terms of, you know it‟s kind of for example a really famous whisky brand we work with, they
already had a Facebook personal profile with their brand name as the name, and the problem is
on a personal profile you can only have 5000 people hooked up to it. Now those 5000 people
were massively engaged so anything they spoke about they commented on or asked questions,
and we knew we can‟t lose that so we set up a page and we set about migrating them over and
stuff but I think moving forward it is going to be increasingly important to have just one
presence on each network.

R: Comparing it to traditional marketing, there seem to be clearer guidelines regarding ROI,

such as the balanced scorecard approach and they all incorporate metrics. Is the difference with
social media the difficulty in putting metrics for engagement and stuff like that?

M: yeah it‟s just such a wider set of metrics that it can be very hard to pull that all together and
put it to somebody in a way that they see the true value in. so in PR, you have the traditional

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AVE which is basically a figure that people created that was this is how much the press
coverage we got was worth to your business. So maybe 50,000 pounds for example and that was
it for PR pretty much the only metric to prove ROI. Now it‟s incredibly out-dated because of the
online, they can‟t necessarily track that. Advertising, for example outdoor advertising like
billboards and stuff are the hardest things to prove ROI on, I mean it‟s almost impossible and
that‟s where social media becomes way more attractive because, regardless of the difficulties in
proving ROI, what we fundamentally can prove is have people seen what you‟re doing and
interacting with it.

R: So it seems that it‟s not a justified criticism that social media has so many ROI difficulties,
where something so widely used as billboard advertising has so few metrics available to
measure effectiveness.

M: yeah. It‟s a valid argument that social media ROI is hard to prove, at a fundamental level it‟s
a valid argument, but, overall there is so much more you can prove with social and digital media
compared to in traditional push markets.

R: In your experience in working for the Big Partnership and other companies, does social
media marketing integrate well with existing marketing departments that are already in
established businesses?

M: It can do but it has to be a concerted effort. There is a big argument regarding social media is
it PR or is it Ad agency or creative agencies so what we always say is that, also social media
can be a massive internal tool as well, so it can actually help a business work, collaborate better
communicate better and really work and increase efficiencies. But for social media and digital
to work, it really, especially social, it has to obviously communicate the overall aims of the
business. So if you‟re in a multi department business or say you have got a PR department, then
you have got a marketing department then you‟ve got the accounts department who are going
wait a minute what‟s this, how‟s it going to bring our margin down etc. then any strategy has to
take into consideration each department might have something to say. So from a PR perspective
what you might want to do is go out and they may want 50 bloggers to go out and write about
this new product but then the marketing people might be saying well actually we are out there
marketing this on billboards or in magazines as something that‟s designed for sophisticated
people but you have just put it on 25 blogs that we are sure the demographic does not match
what we are achieving so you smacking each other and you‟re not getting your whole brand
message ethos out there. But it can be easier said than done and also because social media is a
pretty new channel then education of it throughout this businesses and knowledge of it is low,
but there is also a high fear factor due to the fact that yes your potentially going to open yourself
up to the negativity and your letting competitors see what you‟re up to.

So that can send rumbles through each department and the directors might think it‟s not worth
the risk. So as social media and digital strategists, again your job is to say look if a negative
comment comes in this is the process we will use to deal with it and that process will actually
take into account all different parts of the business depending on what it‟s about. So if it‟s my
iPhone and its falling to bits and somebody goes onto Twitter and says oi apple my iPhone is
knackered that obviously is a customer service issue because they have got to be able to resolve
that, but it‟s also a product issue so the product developments guys, if the camera lens fell off
they need to know about that. That might not happen if the right structures and channels are
installed at the outset.

R: So conflicts within a company can just hinder the performance. So the benefits of a more
integrated departmental strategy are evident.
M: Exactly. Yeah but if you take that, all the influence from the business and then put it into the
voice that‟s out there so take Twitter for example there should always be consistency of who is
delivering that message, monitoring the chatter on there because what can happen is if you say
to one department, right PR department you are in charge of Twitter this week. Now that‟s fine
because it‟s nice to have a mixture of voices but it should still be in the same style but that‟s a
whole different story. And then is the marketing department if the next week it‟s their job to
monitor and make sure all the complaints or nice messages are passed on, that can fall down and
you‟re almost at the beginning of square one each week. So it‟s something that has to be really
strongly structured and taken in consideration.

R: It seems, from some of the experiences I have had with some people, sometimes older, do
not fully understand the concept and think of it as a chore to incorporate ROI and it is very
difficult to persuade them otherwise.

M: that‟s where ROI comes into play, because if they don‟t see an immediate advantage to what
that work your telling them to do or helping them to do they might just go you know what this
isn‟t worth my time and it‟s trying to make sure they are staying on side because it‟s not a quick
win. That‟s the nature and we have said its long term investment so it‟s trying. The best social
media practitioners are the people who are in there every day communicating and trying to learn
and sharing information and absorbing information and people like your example someone who
is 40+, it‟s not an age thing it‟s just fact they are not engaged as people who are 30 or under.
Although one of Facebook‟s largest user groups is 45-55 but when you look at it from a
marketing point of view they are just people who are chatting to their old school pals.

R: yeah

M: but they don‟t necessarily get initially the impact it can have vs. people like us who, I know
you have done a lot of research through Twitter for this dissertation so you know the value of it.
But you also know the value of, for example……well here‟s a thought the leadership thing you
might meet somebody who says oh I‟m trying to do this for my business, social media wise, and
because I have spent time talking to you, you could say actually I‟m pretty sure the Big
Partnership could do that for you. So there is ROI already for me spending time here sitting with
you. Now me sitting here vs. me writing a blog and putting it up on the web isn‟t entirely that
different, because on the blog I would be sharing my thoughts and knowledge and somebody
would be absorbing that so that‟s what it boils down to and its hard hard work, long hard work
and businesses don‟t realise that and people who are trying to get jobs in the social media field
don‟t understand that.

R: But when you are a big company and you have thought about your social media marketing
campaign and you want a unified voice how can you achieve that when you are going to have a
lot of different people managing all these platforms and taking shifts or doing it at different
times. Does that make consistency a big problem?

M: It can be, it really can be. For example Scot Rail. Scot Rail for about 2 years now they have
had their own hash tag dedicated to them on Twitter „Scot Fail‟ because let‟s face it their
customer service is crap, trains don‟t come etc etc. Then they had a Twitter account that was
barely ever touched then the hard weather hit and trains were obliterated and boom all of a
sudden they were on there. It turns out there were four people full time within their customer
service department just doing Twitter during that period. But even though they gave it that
resource they still weren‟t doing well enough to deal with the major queries. So what they were
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doing was somebody might go oh Scot rail have messed up again, and now you need to address
that but at the same time if somebody has come on there saying listen I‟m at Haymarket station
I have been for 45 minutes can you please tell me what‟s happening with the trains, that needs
an immediate response. So what happens is you don‟t get a consistency of response and then
two of those four people phone in sick your two men down and those two haven‟t been dealing
with Mr Smith ...Oh what we going to do what we going to do ... so it‟s a resource heavy thing
to do, and it‟s like I was saying earlier if you pass it between departments and departments the
consistency falls down without the right structure and that‟s where education comes into place.
Say, you know, there are three people in each department that go through a training course, but
yes it can be difficult and a lot of businesses outsource their monitoring and that type of thing to
us so the voice and the messages and that type of stuff comes from them we advise them on
how to deliver it and we either deliver it on their behalf and monitor the fallout from it, not
fallout because that‟s negative, but the reaction to it. If somebody asks a question like what bus
should I get from Glasgow Central to up here we will just take a link from off the site and go
thanks for getting in touch off you go and there‟s some information for you. So agencies can
deal with something like that whereas if it is a really bad complaint, we are then pushing it up
the line and the consistency can fall over. So if we are just giving people information quite
quickly and then somebody comes on to Twitter and they go such and such a bus company is
pissing me off I wonder if I can find them on Twitter. They go onto Twitter and see oh actually
there is a lot of conversation going on between people and the bus company and the bus
company is getting back to them quickly I‟m going to complain through this channel. So if
they then start a complaint through Twitter and it actually takes them like 3 days to get a
response or any kind of resolution that‟s where it falls down, so it has to be consistent.

So what we have with every business we work with is again a structure so we need to know that
if we send you this complaint that you will be in touch either with us so we can talk to the
person on Twitter for example within a two hour period because as we all know it‟s a real time
thing and we expect real time service. The complaint might not be resolved within that day but
they need to acknowledge the fact that we are dealing with it. One of the key things is making
that initial approach online, trying to take it offline so, email or telephone call, but once it is
resolved phone back and say John I‟m so happy that we managed to resolve your problem and
we appreciate your custom and the public can actually see that they did resolve that. But again if
three people are in charge one week and they don‟t actually make sure that you publicly
acknowledge the resolution then their consistency is gone again.

R: What I noticed within my reading is that a lot of the focus on ROI is how you calculate it for
a campaign or a launch, but is there another side where there is a return on investment for
having a social media presence for negative events? For containing like you mentioned any
„fallout‟. This aspect seems almost immeasurable that if you are able to contain a negative event
you could save the company a lot of money.

M: take BP, oil spill, PR disaster on a global scale what immediately happened was somebody
sent to the BP PR Twitter feed started saying you know we are helping the birds and stuff and
then there are folks saying they are not helping the bloody birds look at this bird etc etc.
somebody then set up a lampoon of that called BP PR fail or something like that and its them
taking the piss out of the BP PR people. So if they were comfortable using that BP PR Feed to
actually try and resolve and neutralise some of the negativity then it would have worked well
for them but it‟s clear they didn‟t have the right systems in place to be able to deal with that.
But also it all comes back to being transparent about things so say you are H&M clothes shop,
and they are really good at social media, and they all of a sudden there is a story in the press
that actually their jumper, top selling jumper has been made in a sweat shop in Indonesia. Crap
how are we going to deal with that. Now if you have a history of being really transparent and
honest with your customers and your prospects through social media then anything you say to
counter act those arguments is actually going to be way more believable and…

R: Credible

M: yeah, and you‟re not lying, you never want to lie which is something BP were doing so yeah
I mean have it in there in times of need is obviously a huge, huge thing but not without having
previous history.

R: Just setting up a social media response to the negative event does not have the same weight
as having, like you said, trust built up with people.

M: I think in that lecture I talked about Kit Kat and the orang-utans and how they were going
onto their Facebook page and insulting people, initially saying you clearly can‟t read. That‟s
just horrific, that‟s just not how you do anything. But yeah there are positives about having the
presence but if it just springs up in the event of an emergency or really bad PR then unless you
go out and say I know we have not been out here before we want to hear your views on this and
answer as many questions we can which is fine but most businesses and brands are too arrogant
to do that. Or they go why the hell we want to open this up online when we are getting
hammered in the news and the press anyway.

R: Because this is my first interview I was wondering if you could give a list of key points
regarding ROI for social media to help summarise what we have been talking about?

M: Yeah, yeah sure. I guess the basic process, so if I‟m the owner of a business, say I‟m the
owner of this Beanscene place, I need to go and look at where things aren‟t working out. So it
can be as fundamental as bringing out the accounts and saying well do you know what are sales
records are? For example our lattes are not selling well, what are we going to do about that?
That could be a case of, like we were saying earlier, going out and asking our fans or people we
know how we can improve our latte. But I think the problem is from a business point of view
people will always look at it and go how can I actually affect that figure, so how do we…it‟s
very difficult if people are not aware of what they can do with digital and social media then it‟s
very difficult for them to actually say this is what I want to achieve and this is how I am going
to get there. And they tend to want it yesterday you know? But I think my key point is don‟t get
too tied up in the bottom line, eventually you will see that working out if you do it right. But it
can be as simple as things like I want to spread the knowledge about Beanscene within Glasgow
but at the moment I feel that I‟m only getting people from exactly the surrounding area so its
targeting those people online but it‟s so hard to give it three or four points of this how you
decide what it is that you want. Obviously it has to relate back to the key needs of your business
and its then working out is social media going to achieve that or is stuff I‟m doing on Facebook,
Twitter, blogging, YouTube whatever, is that actually bringing people through the door.
Because unless you are an online business for example then you‟re not necessarily going to be
able to track your sales off the back of it unless you‟re doing vouchers and „show me your
phone‟ and that type of thing. It‟s very hard to narrow it down and it is a big question within the
industry of how do we just have a, sort of a standard, like there is AVE for PR and that‟s the
industry standard but everyone‟s questioning it now but people are still quoting it all the time.
So who is going to be the authority saying this is how you should do it, here‟s the standard.

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R: But what do you think are the components, one obvious possible component would be things
like Google Analytics, linking up your social media to your website, in terms of traffic etc. and
seeing what kind of sales that might be leading to?

M: Yeah that‟s the thing we were talking about the measurement of it is actually very easy once
you are doing it. If your website is a hub and that‟s where you are sending everyone back then
that‟s what gives it an advantage over traditional media. We can say we got a thousand clicks,
those people who came through on that link spent five minutes on the site whereas your average
link from an email campaign only drove people on the site for two minutes. They actually
looked at six pages of your site vs. one page, and if people are more engaged in the social space
and are coming through a link and you‟ve built up a rapport with them they are more likely to
want to know more about you. A lot of it comes down to almost old school web analytics
because at the end of the day that‟s the best way of measuring it. And then if you try to take
that, the key thing is to try and take things online and just making them mean something when
you sit down with board and you say this is what has happened. Having these figures behind
you which are easy to obtain if you‟re visiting the right analytic steps can be a massive weapon
and it can change their perception of it as a marketing channel. Instead of just saying we have
10,000 followers on Facebook ..

C.2 Interview in person with Colin Boyd and Greg Ruxton

from Boyd Digital.
R: Hi, if you could both give a little background information about yourselves and what you do
regarding social media?

C: Well I am Colin Boyd, and my background is in search engine optimisation, I‟ve been in it
now since about 2001, 2002, predominantly with travel companies. Loads of work with half of
the FTSE 100 companies in terms of marketing. Decided about year ago maybe, a bit longer
than a year ago maybe, that I had worked for enough „cowboys‟ and that it was time to actually
deliver to clients what they had decided, what they want to, what they thought they were paying
for where as with other agencies it wasn‟t quite working like that. And to be pure, on, ah use me
to grow their business rather than just as a nice add on, we are doing it because everyone else is
doing. So a lot of our client work is basically contracted for growth of business. So we
guarantee within 18 months we will, add things on to your business, it doesn‟t always work out,
you know ash clouds and economic downturns step in the way of these things every now and
again. But there is still the aim, and our aim is always to move people towards the bigger
number.

R: So very growth oriented.

C: Totally, always on growth. We never do anything for vanity there isn‟t any point, and we
wouldn‟t take their money which is essentially what a lot of other companies will say, yeah you
need to pay us a lot of money and we will come done with fancy bits of paper and show you
how things work. So we get rid of that by saying, we are not going to turn up in suits we are not
going to turn up in a Range Rover Sport, we are here to do a good job for you. We always talk
straight we never employ a sales guy.

R: Yeah it seems that companies may have gotten away with that before but now with many
companies very specifically results orientated, they can‟t get away with selling them, „oh it‟s
very complicated we will take care of it‟
C: When we originally started we used to do a bit of everything, email marketing to web design
to e-commerce platforms but we realised that we were spreading ourselves too thin and that
there are better people at web design than us there are better people at e-commerce platforms
than us. Speaking about myself, before I started this I was probably head hunted from every
agency you know this side of Carlyle. So I was fairly at the top of my game, then I brought
Grant in who is, well I will let Grant speak about Grant.

G: I studied marketing at Strathclyde, from there became a marketing manager of a chain of

nightclubs in Glasgow. After a fire that came to an end, one of the big clubs got burnt down,
then worked in publishing, marketing and sales roles, then worked for a multinational fashion
chain and that‟s when I started the move from purely offline marketing into, you know one eye
on, internet marketing . That was probably 2003 when it all was beginning to develop, and then
from there went to work for a digital agency and that‟s when I met Colin. Worked for various
digital agencies in Glasgow and ended up running tolet.com for a while. Tolate.com is a mini
social network in essence, it‟s based around clubbing and dance music, nightlife, so but in the
UK alone it did like a million page impressions a month so not small but not as massive as
something like Facebook.

R: So it‟s specifically targeted on this scene.

G: yeah, very, very targeted. After working for agencies and toolate.com just sort of got fed up
working for other people, and having to put up with other peoples stupidity you know, came
here to work with Colin get some good clients, on the horizon that we could be willing to work
the way we wanted to work. A much better opportunity all in.

R: Please feel free, either of you, when I ask questions if you have something to add. So how
does Boyd Digital cater to a client who, maybe they don‟t have a social media presence and
have come to you...

C: essentially, what we do is define the strategy from the word go. For instance when we had
done it for Barrhead Travel, they had several Twitter accounts, they had a bit of a YouTube
channel, they had a Facebook page, but it wasn‟t really growing it was just kinda stagnant
sitting there so we put some strategies in place, very early on stuff you know, let‟s get give
away holidays, let‟s give away discounts let‟s get people in by essentially discounting your
product, which is never a good way to grow a business. But what we had done on the back of
that was come up with some good campaigns like invite your friends and get discounts, and
then we did a fair amount,…our speciality is an aggressive side there, we are never going to put
up you know I had an egg sandwich for my lunch that kind of social media just to keep it
ticking along, we move and aggressively find people who should be following us and I annoyed
them until they followed us. We did that with Facebook, we did that with Twitter, we grew their
presence online from couple of hundred to about 9000, in two months three months something
like that. Then the ash cloud came along, and then they could actively and instantly connect
with 9000 people. Many of those people were on holiday with another airline or another travel
agency and they became the information source at the point because they were so well kinda
seeded out there and the same thing with another company called Gold Trails Travel it went
bust which left something like 10,000 people in Majorca. And so they were able to use their
social media to pass information which gained business, not direct business but the help that
they gave them over that, they then staffed their pcs over the weekend, answered emails to
anybody that wanted emails so they understood. So they understood, a lot of people don‟t

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understand the social media they don‟t understand the value in it. Our value was always we will
make this make you bookings. Our strategies are always based around what will make you
money, they are about growth because obviously even in a search engine or a basic or any
business model you need people who [inaudible]… you need to put a number in to get a number
out. That was always our goal, I think our goal was to get to, I think it was 25,000 over a year,
and we stopped at about 10,000 to put more effort into SEO at the time. The market was
fluctuating a wee bit all over the place and they thought they got as much as they were going to
get out of that.

R: So they shifted their focus?

C: They shifted their focus just for a wee while they are probably going to go back into it this
year.

G: It was just a wee bit too early for them. It‟s the type of company where they want to see the
money in everything they want to see the phone ringing from everything.

C: Yeah say you have a TV advertisement, they want to have the phone to ring. So with social
media they didn‟t get the longevity of the project.

G: It was generating sales for them.

C: Actual physical sales.

G: It was just not enough, it didn‟t tally up in their mind. The money they were spending on it to
the amount of sales they were getting.

R: yeah this is great because this is where my perspective came, I thought when clients go to
you, because like you said that‟s exactly what they want, they want phones ringing they want to
see the sales and that seems to be the difficult part.

C: There at two ways that we probably could have done this Rudy, you know we could have sat
you here and say we take a lot of money from a lot of people and everything‟s great and the
gardens flourishing, and everything is rosy. But that‟s no the situation that‟s not what happens
when you walk out down that street...

G: Yeah there is a big social media arms race going on, people think we need to have it and
have a hash at it. Someone comes in and charges them thousand s of pounds to do something
they really could have done themselves.

C: If you walked in here saying, I sell those leather pouches for iPhones and I want a social
media campaign. You know how much do you have to spend on that? The next question is how
much do you spend on your SEO? Well I‟m spending nothing on my SEO. Well you should
take that money and spend it there. How much are you spending on your pay-per-click? I‟m not
spending anything... so take that money and spend it there. How much are you spending on the
usability of your website? Nothing... so it‟s the end of the game, it‟s not the beginning of the
game. There‟s a lot of social media „gurus‟ and „experts‟ out there who have come out of the PR
world but not from the actual making money online type of world. They are just good at talking
about stuff. You don‟t need people talking about stuff you need to sell. You need to be
physically selling all the time that‟s what keeps the links on and the people coming to your
business.
R: So you would definitely tell them that it is part of a wider range of tools for your online
presence?

C: Nearly the last thing.

G: It depends on the brand.

C: If it‟s a single product brand that doesn‟t sell online, or if it‟s a pure e-tailer. Like play.com,
they will do a bit of it. But it will never take up a proportion of their time compared to display
ads, pay-per-click ads, affiliate marketing, all these things, it‟s part of the mix rather.

R: When companies come to you are they using these other methods?

C: They tend to be using us for it.

G: yeah quite often, no clue at all or like you say they will have heard about it, know that they
need to do it but don‟t really know how. Their chairman has read something at a conference or
someone‟s told them and he‟s right kicked their arse to get going. So yeah when somebody
comes to us, any brand, talking about social media we will be like what‟s your goal for the
social media? Depends how marketing centric that company is, whether right at the heart of that
business is the marketing strategy.

R: That brings me to my next question. So do they come with clear goals and objectives, or do
you help form them?

C: We form them. Usually based around numbers.

G: There will be companies out there that know, their marketing managers, directors know
exactly what they want. And they come and say here are my goals, help me.

C: Because it goes through a lifecycle.

G: To be honest most of these people are a bit unsure.

C: Yeah, we make a bit of money online and we want to make more. They are kinda looking for
advice.

G: Sometimes we really need to tease out their needs and what they want to achieve or where
they see things going.

C: It‟s about expectations, what do they expect to get for this. A lot of the time if you ask them
that they go, well my competition is doing it so I should be doing it. Now if you focus on
another bit of marketing and get a better share of natural search would be worth more to you
than a bigger share in social media. The problem with social media in my mind at the moment is
how do you quantify the market?

G: You could call Colin a social media sceptic because he is first and foremost from SEO.

C: Yeah, yeah totally. SEO is direct sales, you spend money on it you rankings move up, the
company makes money, it‟s clear it simple. Social media I totally get but when I attack that
with a sort of SEO frame of mind, how can I make this 50,000 people, who I‟m in contact with
everyday come to my website or buy something or get an email address or whatever. And
you‟re saying how do we quantify it all well we had a meeting this morning, which wasn‟t
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related to this. We started doing this, see we never really marketed ourselves, which is probably
a big problem for other companies who do this sort of thing. So one of the things I went and
done, was going over to the competition and seeing how many Facebook fans they‟ve got, how
many Twitter followers they have, how many YouTube subscribers do they have, and I want
more of them. So it is a numbers game, it‟s purely I want more than him.

G: But social media can be used for loads of different things...

C: Well it can be used internally quite well...

R: Yeah I have been researching that…

G: For some types of company social media is a hard sell almost to the point of, yeah take your
page, take your Twitter account, protect your brand but just leave it. Like oil companies…..

R: Do you think with B2B businesses it‟s a bit harder?

C: well we actually came up with a good strategy for Scottish Motor Auctions, was that they
have buying agents. They get cars in from the likes of Hertz. Hertz keeps a car for say ten
months, and then they send it to an auction to try and get near close to value back in it. So what
they have is a buying guy at Arnold Clark, they have a buying guy at Peter Vardy, all these big
motor companies. Now when we talked to them about the social media they said no we don‟t
want process of cars going up there, they are on auctions and you don‟t know the price until the
auction time. So we don‟t really want to do live auctions because we are already that in a kind
of eBay style, so what would we use it for? Well we said their biggest thing is, they sell the odd
car to the public, but they sell a 100 cars to Arnold Clark. And the Arnold Clark guy basically
looks through a list and goes yeah I want lot 1. That‟s it, 100 cars, they are going on the back of
a trailer and going to Arnold Clark.

G: Arnold Clark guys are fighting against different Arnold Clark guys. And Peter Vardy guys
fighting against them.

C: Aye...

R: to get the best lot?

C: So we gave them the strategy that they should close group those people. They should get
them into a Facebook Group, or even Twitter, though it probably isn‟t the best place for it, but
in a Facebook group and when new cars come in, they can put it up and say, we‟ve got these,
phone me up and buy them. And the first guy to react to that, who is sitting at his desk,
Facebook pops up, SMA have got a hundred Fords or whatever, picks up the phone and its
gone. The next guys missed it.

R: And its fair because they are all notified at the same time.

G: It will keep people ahead of the game, because the old dinosaur, sheep-skin coat wearing
type, someone will phone them up and they work the way they have always worked but sooner
or later they are not going to be around, it leaves, or it puts our client at the forefront for these
young guys, the social media generation that are up to do things differently and much more
efficiently. We talked about tying in a smartphone app as well into that system. So previously
they had to wait to get the catalogue posted to them, they were up until fairly recently emailing
it from outlook with a pdf. Which is awful for a number of reasons, a brand value point of view
because it‟s a wee guy in a branch in England sending whatever not, off brand stuff, with the
catalogue. But with a smartphone as soon as the central marketing manager wants it to go its
goes and the young guys can see every car on their phone and in some cases buy straight from
their phones. So it‟s a good example of how, over time that would put money into their pockets,
but it‟s still hard to quantify it. But form a strategic business point of view…

C: The understanding the cost is a different thing. The cost of doing it and the value of doing it.
Do they stack up next to each other? Is probably the bigger question. They knew it would work,
but was it worth, you know, the man hours, the time of setting it up you know these things.

G: In terms of ROI for social media, social media strategy like that can be the difference
between a company still being around in five years time. Or a company being number one in
five years time that was maybe number five before they got into social media. If they have a
good strategy and if they stick to it if they work at it.

C: Sticking to strategies is people‟s problem. I‟ve seen a lot of people wavering left to right.
Brand protection is great, but the problem with using it for brand protection is that if somebody
says your product is shit, and it is shit, you can try and tell them it‟s good, but you‟re going to
incur even more shit. So it‟s...

G: Well you don‟t tell them it‟s good you tell them it‟s a value product haha...

C: You have just got to, can‟t think of any examples off the top of my head…BP is a good
example, they went on to Twitter and told everybody that the beaches were clean. People went
down, took pictures of the beach and posted it straight back to them.

R: Similar to the Nestle mess-up on Facebook when they had that advert about the orang-utans
and the palm olive, they were cutting down the vegetation for them. And people were concerned
and writing on their Facebook page, and they were replying, being quite rude to all these people,
and it was just shooting themselves in the foot.

G: yeah that‟s down to good public relations, a good public relations guy in-house that
understands social media can employ tactics that can nip that sort of thing in the bud or in
Nestles case avoid it.

R: It seems that with a big company it‟s hard when you have one person who is almost the voice
for them because he is talking with their customers.

C: This brings you on to how do you set up the team, which is probably more important that you
no really asked. It‟s something not a lot of people ask, it is massively important how you set
up...

R: Are you talking about their team when you work with them?

C: you have got to manage them...you were going on about this last week?

G: yeah we did the why do you need a social media consultant.

C: Aye and first and foremost it should be seen as a marketing channel where you are trying to
sell something. Secondly it should be seen as the nicey nicey, we will try and take care of you...

G: I disagree, see for some brands, it should be the other way around. For aspirational brands it
should be, it‟s all about the brand, and if you sell a bit through it, great. Because ultimately, two

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t-shirts, the branded one will sell for 40 pound the exact same t-shirt without the brand name
sells for ten pound. Why is that worth more? It is because they spend thousands of pounds on
sponsorship thousands of pounds on advertising, thousands of pounds on getting famous people
to wear that t-shirt. And that is where social media fits in, that‟s where the ROI for those brands
is in social media just because without, all the fuss on Facebook, without all the hundred
thousand fans they are just another t-shirt, they are just another white t-shirt that‟s worth a
tenner. But with a hundred thousand Facebook fans and with the other brand stuff that goes with
it they are worth forty pound, times a hundred thousand t-shirts a year.

R: I want to get back to that specific aspect about, some goals are monetary like you said sales,
and some of them are about brand awareness and how they link to ROI. But first, on your
website it says you offer results driven social media marketing. So in terms of monitoring, and
performance, what kind of tools do you use? What analytics? Metrics?

C: We are actually quite simple, we tracked everything through Bit.ly, so we could prove we
were delivering traffic on Google Analytics which is never a like for like basis. We also have
our own URL shortening service, safe-url.org, so we post some stuff through that as well and it
can be tracked and measured as well.

G: We can tag links as well so you can...

C: yeah so you can see the UTM tracking coming through...

G: It can come in from Facebook…it can come in from…

R: so it tells you where the source is?

G: Yeah we can tell you where the source is from but we can also attribute them directly to us
which helps our ROI, for clients.

C: Because it pops up as the source being Boyd Digital. In terms of using things like Radiant
Six, I‟m not 100%, it just tells you what already happened, where as social media you need to
be there when it happens. If it happened yesterday too late. Where Radiant Six tends to tell you
what happened in the last thirty days.

G: at the level most companies are in Scotland, Radiant Six isn‟t a massive concern. Start going
into your Fords? Your coca-colas, that‟s when Radiant Six, or buzz monitoring, comes more
into effect because they have armies of analysts, brand people, monitoring by territory, whereas
a campaign launched in the Glasgow area has that had any impact. Bringing that information,
was the impact neutral, its fed back to their brand agencies, and they go right ok that creative
wasn‟t very good so it‟s like mega high level stuff that‟s not really in Scotland with the
foresight or the money to use it.

R: if you‟re taking the Barrhead Travel example, for that case what was the important thing to
measure?

C: Well the target was to grow it, it was to get within two years to have a reach of fifty
thousand. They wanted to be able to tell fifty thousand people on a Monday morning that they
had a special offer. That would be their goal.

R: so that was their main objective, to have this reach.

C: targeted by region, so geo-targeted so everybody would have to be from Glasgow, Edinburgh

or West of Scotland, and then. Well we were originally going to grow it by airport location, so
there are 35 airports in the UK so we were going it by location based around the airports and
that was working very well for them. We then tracked clicks just to make sure what we were
saying was working… when they were originally doing it, every day they just put up, four
nights in a three star hotel in Malaga for 299, every day, offer, offer, offer, offer, offer. We gave
them a strategy to stop selling on it.

G: If we have any social media client we give them a content strategy, right here is the
frequency you should be posting stuff, the things you should be posting...

R: Because discounting works and if you take Direct2Dell outlet store, their Twitter account
made something like 3 million dollars through discounting and stuff.

C: Lastminute.com attributed 3 million to social media, in sales, was that last year?

G: mmm hmm

C: Last year they reckon it was worth that so, they probably have a big team in place to manage
that. They are doing a lot of city break stuff and they are trying to get a feedback loop in place
where you go for a city break you take you pictures, post it on their thing, tell them how it was
and kinda get that loop. And the management in that is massive, the systems involved, and it
probably doesn‟t give you anymore sales. Probably just makes the length of time talking about
your holiday a wee bit longer. Everybody tends to go on holiday, get back, first two days, yeah
it was great it was sunny every day, here are pictures, bosh, done. Don‟t talk to me because I‟m
depressed, I‟m three days back and I cannae wait to go again. So a lot of travel companies seem
to that when people went to a holiday to Paris they want to talk about it forever.

G: They do, the cruisers like to talk about it, you know cruise people, it‟s a bit of a niche within,
but aye just can‟t get enough of it. „I actually had the second cabin from the right‟…

R: ha ha

C: They tend to be middle income people, trying to act like upper income people. And that‟s
probably, you know, the Hyacinth buckets of the World, telling everyone how brilliant it was so
that they can tell you they were on a cruise.

G: Where the Barrhead stuff, most came onto its own was with the Facebook, Twitter…young
folk people of that generation so I want to go away on this date, there are four of us, where‟s
good?

C: Yeah the Twitter thing and the Facebook was I‟ve got 300 pound I want to go away on
Friday...

R: so they were using it to interact with...

G: People are on doing via direct chat, on Facebook, and also direct messages...

C: It was direct sales which was a bit shocking. The guy did a search, sent a link back and they
booked it. That was weird didn‟t expect that. So it was like an actual online travel agent. Like
Yahoo answers, Facebook, for travel. It was getting quite good there was loads of people
coming in and saying oh I want to go to Prague for a weekend break, and at Barrhead they
would go and get a guy who knew about Prague and sat them down and said stay in this hotel
because you can go there and you can go here and it was starting to pick up really well.
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G: As time goes on more and more people will begin to feel comfortable to transact on
Facebook and Twitter. It‟s a generational thing.

C: Well you spent nearly three months with them getting what we just called an information
flow, was that when we requested it, how do they get straight back to us? Or if somebody on
Facebook or Twitter. When we first started that it was, when we ask a question, this person will
answer it. But he will have to pass it on to his manager and he will pass it on to somebody else
pass it to this pass it to that and eventually it would come back to us. So we went back to them
saying no you need to cut this line out and you need to cut this line out and it took a while, took
a very long time. Everybody was scared, everybody just thought my job is to sell something and
I don‟t to be sitting here answering questions all day, when it wasn‟t actually the fact they were
only asking two or three questions every couple of days and that was it. But those people who
were asking were coming straight back and they were genuinely new customers. They were not
Barrhead people who couldn‟t be bothered phoning.

G: as time goes on more and more people will be prepared to transact like that. We thought
maybe it was a little bit too early for Barrhead travel there were not enough people who transact
like that just now. But as time goes on what, kinda what‟s going to happen in the next year, or a
year or two years, it will be the norm to buy a lot more things directly through Facebook.

R: You were mentioning content, it‟s not always about using discounting promotions. How do
you sell that to clients when they want to see their Dollars or their Pounds for their social media
and then you are telling them you should be engaging? A lot of authors say it‟s all about the
content for social media.

C: Well there are two ways to gauge, to put stuff up there and hope people come back or to wait
for somebody to ask a question. If somebody asks a question you can turn them into a customer
very easily. So it‟s picking and choosing, our content flow is always wait until we are asked a
question. We would seed questions along the line of, do you need anything about here, do you
need to know anything about that. And then proved worth when somebody come back and said
yeah I need a hotel near the beach there. They tended to be mostly sales messages coming back
in. Saying can you tell me how to get here, how to get here, yes book this hotel and I can send
you there. So it was, I think between the three month period there were two hundred online
bookings that were attributed to Facebook. Which in the grand scheme of things isn‟t a massive
amount but from zero to that in three months...

R: Do you think there were more sales that would have happened because of their online
presence but you can‟t link it?

C: Totally, there conversion rate on their website shot up as well. For that period.

G: The other thing was that, over the course of our dealings with them, the direct traffic, natural
search traffic with the term Barrhead or Barrhead travel or various terms around that increased.
Which I think was partly attributed to the spread on Facebook and Twitter. There were more
people in a sort of digital sphere getting via messages they were putting out but also through
friend‟s networks and things, it was at the front of people‟s minds. They think of holidays, so
they maybe think I‟m going to look at a few places tonight for my holiday, they have seen a
Thomas Cook brochure, they walk past the Thomas Cook shops and check that out. They see a
Travel advert on the telly so they check that out and maybe they have seen Barrhead Travel a
few times on Facebook so that‟s one they check out.
R: When a client already has an online platform for selling, do you form a baseline for their
online sales and then when you do a social media campaign you can see how that changed?

C: You can do that but you don‟t need to base that it‟s pretty evident, you just need to put some
UTM tracking in place. That‟s if they are just using something basic like Google Analytics or
these things they can set up with the campaign and see it coming in very easily. Because we do
social media and the SEO bit, we tend to go in and do some IB testing on their booking process.
In terms of Barrhead at that time, we trebled their bookings just by changing three pages of their
website. Just made it all clearer. What we could have done at the time was fire the feedback out
to social networks and say do you like this better? But we didn‟t we just started monitoring the
percentage growth.

G: I think with social media content, in my minds what‟s important it the value of the content.
It‟s got to be, it can‟t just be oh I had an egg sandwich type rubbish, it can‟t just be hum-drum.

R: They have to be interested?

G: yeah to read it. I might not like their Facebook Page if I don‟t tell me anything I don‟t
already know. And it has also got to have personality. There are various bands, music, people
that we work with and there is one particular band that probably will make it big this year. And
it looks to me like someone‟s doing their social media, no doubt about it, its very text book and
just lacks personality.

C: It‟s totally somebody has read the Dummies Guide to Social media marketing.

G: They are doing everything right it‟s just missing that…

R: Intangible something...

G: Yeah if we look at Stephen Fry, one of the most massive people on Twitter. Because he is
Stephen Fry, he has got that personality, he probably is if you analysed all his stuff doing maybe
60-70% of the text book stuff in terms of retweets, talking about this sort of thing that sort of
thing, but it‟s because it‟s him because he has got personality. So the same goes for a company.
If they don‟t have any personality social media becomes hard. But if the company has
personality, if the brand has personality, it‟s a bit easier.

So there are a lot of different types of ROI for social media, and at the moment the direct, I‟ve
spent ten grand in building and developing this ROI in social media. So in six months let me see
do I get ten grand worth of sales out of it? Directly related. At the moment no, that‟s probably
going to change to a degree with the likes of Asus putting all their stock online…because you
can buy directly from Facebook now. And there are lots of little things like that happening. You
can put on your pages buy now tabs and you can do almost anything within a tab. The
technology is there to enable people to buy from Facebook, the social thing is moving towards,
yeah that‟s ok, and it‟s fine to buy something on Facebook, that‟s the norm.

R: Before we get into that, because I do want to, when you talk in terms of ROI some people
seem to disagree online. One camp says that the „return‟ part of the equation has to be money
that‟s in the bank that was because of your social media sales. Because that‟s what ROI is. If
you‟re measuring engagement and all these non-financial aspects they are important but that
isn‟t what ROI is. And the other side says ROI is money and it is engagement and it is brand

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awareness and it is these things. Do you see a distinction, do you see that if you are talking
strictly in terms of ROI it‟s a money thing?

C: I do he doesn‟t! I think that if you‟re not making money, that money should be spent
elsewhere because sales come first.

G: Yes with certain clients I would never give them the, oh but you‟re getting your engagement
and brand chat because it‟s not what they are talking to us for.

C: If you‟re selling a pair of trainers, if you make trainers you want companies to buy it so you
need to be promoting the brand, which is why they have David Beckham in their adverts, so that
JJB Sports say why would we not have Adidas. So they need branding at that level but it still
comes down to sales. They might not be able to say that pound there equalled that pound there.
But will be able to say that ten million pound there equalled that ten million pound there. So it‟s
cumulative probably…

G: The first line of ROI is probably the purest that if I spent ten pound on social media did I get
ten pound back? And if you know what you‟re doing you can properly track it and you can
justify it.

C: Because you can make real money with social media. Real money.

R: Ok but if you decide you want to go down that route and your talking money. There must be
challenges in identifying the revenue link. Because is it always clear?

C: no, they have just got to click.

G: See the challenge comes when you have, they saw us first on Facebook, then later went on
our website.

R: Or even a bricks-and-mortar store...

C: Yeah but you could cookie track them. But it‟s did they click through twitter and buy it? Did
they click through Google? If they clicked through Google that wasn‟t a social media sale. They
might have used Google to find you but they still used Google. So that filters back to SEO.
Because if you are not there for your brand then they are not going to find you.

R: So you definitely make a distinction between search engine driven traffic sales and social
media.

C: Yeah, totally.

R: So how do you link the sales from social media, from a Twitter account, Facebook? Just
through links to different landing pages on your site?

G: Yeah Bit.ly or UTM tracking so it goes into Google Analytics or your package analyser,
social media traffic, and you just bundle up all your social media tracking and say right, what
did they buy and then you can analyse it further. Social media, click, transact more or less than
the average transaction?

C: See we done it with the people who had bought through Facebook had a better conversion
rate. The conversion rate was actually higher through Facebook than it was through Google.
G: Most people will tell you that Facebook fans or Twitter followers will spend more with the
brand. But you can get into that can get into the argument of did they like your Facebook page
because they already liked your brand?

C: We are talking about it as front-end where I don‟t think that‟s where social media lies.
Connect to people and then make them buy stuff. Where I think social media is truly valuable to
any company that sells online is that once you have gone and bought something, that company
has to do everything in its power to keep you as a customer. That‟s where social media comes
in, that‟s where they should be offering all sorts of anything, you know we will give you the
next one at half price so you like us Twitter us link to us or whatever. Because the value of the
customer of the lifetime is more important than, or will make your money than spending the
money up front to say yeah we have fifty thousand people on that Facebook page, they click
through and they buy stuff, or did the Buy stuff then done it the other way? So if you‟re using it
as an exit strategy, people have bought something how do I keep them? Which was always the
big challenge. People said well we will use email marketing. Email marketing was too slow for
this sort of thing. You could only email people once a week, and do they really want what they
just bought a week ago? But what you can do with social media is keep their interest going,
keep it peaked.

R: With content, and then when they are in that stage where they want the product again you are
already in touch with them. It‟s not like you left them for a long time.

G: An important part of any social media strategy is giving social network people things that
non-social media user doesn‟t get. So like giving social media fans or followers the first
allocation of tickets to a festival or a gig. Like the night before a gig, 1000 tickets are set aside
for social media followers to get it and that gives them a reason to be on social media and to tell
people about it.

R: And to keep checking in with the platforms.

G: They get a ticket before everyone else they will tell all their mates ahh I got a ticket before
you did pal.

R: Yeah, I always try to relate, because social media is such a hot topic, to something like a
billboard advertisement. They can only calculate ROI in terms of how many people drove past
the advert but they don‟t know how many people went and bought something or were more
likely to buy something. Why do you think there is such a focus on ROI in regards to social
media?

C: The problem of why I think there is a focus is that... Right, what happened is social media
killed PR. It came up with a big hammer and bopped it in the nut and said nobody wants press
releases anymore. That‟s not necessarily true there is still a market for good press releases. But
all these PR companies, which if you go up West Reagent Street there is like ten of them up
there. They have all got a new social media guru. What these people are very good at, is talking
about themselves. They are the ones who read all the shitty American books and tell people,
yeah tell them you went to Subway today, tell them you had an egg sandwich. They are saying,
woah you don‟t need ROI in social media, because you can never track it you never track ROI
in any traditional bran, any traditional media. You couldn‟t do it in billboards, you couldn‟t do
it in PR. It wasn‟t until search engine optimisation came along, and pay-per-click advertising
and affiliate marketing could you say yeah I spent that amount of money and that amount of
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money came back. So if I spent more there I will make more there. Oh that makes sense. Cut the
display, ads, cut the TV ads, cut the PR.

R: So you are saying with SEO and pay-per-click etc. there is a concrete link between the
money spent and the return. Do you think that is somewhere that social media can go? Or is it
too different?

G: See I think its fine just as it is now. With social media yes you will get some direct sales that
tracking will show you. And over time because of cultural changes that will probably increase.
But with social media there will always be the intangible bit beside it. Say you spent ten grand
on social media, and you say in x months you will get ten grand back in terms of ROI. The
company is not going to be very happy because technically we have made a loss, if they usually
make a margin where you spend ten and make twenty. And if you don‟t make money the
agencies will big up the brand awareness and all this other intangible stuff...

R: Thanks guys that was a very helpful interview, I appreciate the time.
C.3 Interview with Gary Ennis from NS Design.
R: Thanks again for meeting with me and if you could tell me a little bit about yourself first?

G: Sure, NS Design is basically a digital design agency. Traditionally we have been the
equivalent of the web design agency. So we have been going 13 years throughout that time we
have been helping businesses do things in an online capacity. So traditionally that‟s been
website design...

R: That was what your core things were?

G: exactly, exactly. Helping clients establish themselves online, and the branding of themselves
and positioning themselves in an online capacity. More and more, over the past, arguably, even
two years, maybe three years, the subject of social media has come up more and more and more.
As its becoming more popular, more common, more buzz wordy clients are, now more than
ever, savvy about being recognised as being something in this. And our role is often to kind of,
just as it is with building a website, to explain the benefits, what works, what doesn‟t, how to
advise them on it. At the end of the day it is still their site and what they want, even after all our
advice if it‟s still against their wishes we sometimes there it‟s something we have to help them
with. Our role is there almost as kind of advisor, or coach or whatever so that we can walk them
through what is good, what isn‟t, and allow them to make decisions based on that expertise, that
guidance. And because of where we are and how we have positioned ourselves in the past, we
see it as, I suppose it‟s all part of the online experience. You know none of this stuff works in
isolation...

R: It‟s not separate units, it‟s all part of a big strategy.

G: Exactly, it‟s simply representing them online, obviously through different channels, through
different routes, but at the end of that day it‟s still very much about the business and looking to
do the best for the business in the online space and how to do that.

R: So if a client comes to you and, maybe a lot of the time they want to do web development
and stuff like that, do they come to you specifically for social media?

G: Yep, yep. More and more we are getting that, absolutely. It will either be clients who we
already have got an existing relationship with. And maybe it‟s kind of a bit of a chicken and egg
scenario, a lot of our clients know that we now, arguably, specialise to some extent in social
media. So they will have heard us talking about it and that‟s spurred them on to come speak to
us etc. or indeed maybe because of the media interest, all of these things at the moment, you
know, Twitter movie and blah blah blah, there is a kind of general you know popularity thing
going on at the moment that‟s driving the interest in it.

R: yeah what I found is that a lot of companies want to do it because...

G: everyone else is doing it. Yeah

R: Yeah their competitors are doing it. So what do you offer them, like what kind of services?

G: Sure. I mean we do a number of things at different levels, first and foremost, which is where
we have, touch wood, got a bit of a good name, and good reputation in, is very top level
workshops. For example for over two years now we have been working with a lot of big

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partners who have access to businesses a lot of small businesses or medium enterprises. And we
are out there, on the ground as it were, running workshops in social media. They are a very top
level, our remit from that level workshop is to get customers in the room, i.e. businesses in the
room who are online, they are doing things on the web etc. They know there is something in
social media but don‟t know where to start, where to begin, if it‟s going to work for them, how
to do it. Any of the kind of questions, they just kinda know there is a buzz going about, that
there is something in this from a business point of view. We run these workshops where the
main remit at the end of them is for them to be walking out of the workshop going right we get
it. Now they may still not know exactly the best route forward or the details or strategy to put in
place but they walk out knowing why there is so much buzz about social media at the moment
and understanding the potential. We show them very relevant, good case studies, small
businesses large businesses making real business potential use out of social media. And yes of
course we sell it to them in terms of the facts and figures and how can you afford to ignore the
numbers although the numbers alone aren‟t a case for doing it. Just like, just because everyone
else is does not mean you should. But arguably there is always a reason based around that. And
we show them some very top level immediate wins to be had using social media. We mainly use
Twitter and show them how Twitter from day one to get benefit from it or to get value from it to
get insight from it, and suddenly your data mining the thoughts of the public and how is that not
a good thing in a business capacity.

We show them all of these things, and like I said the remit from those types of workshops, is so
that they walk away going, right we get it. If nothing else they go away and we never hear from
them again and we at least hope they were spurred on to go and try this, to dip their toe in, if
you like, then great because we are confident that most businesses see benefit in all of this.
Beyond that, we offer a number of other services. We offer more advanced one-to-one type
coaching, teaching…

R: is that after one of these workshops they say...

G: exactly after one of these workshops, again at the risk of sounding too, blowing our own
trumpet, we always get a number of people, if there is 20-30 companies we will get a number of
them saying right we want to do more, can you come in to speak to us saying right how can you
help us specifically, our specific reasons and so on. So we have a number of other kind of
workshops, tutorial type of material beyond that they can look into a lot more on the specifics.
And often we will work with companies one-to-one, doing things like helping them formulate
what the strategy is. Yes you can just jump in, don‟t get me wrong, it will potentially just work
for you jumping in and going for it because if you kinda get the reasons for doing it and just get
on with doing it, it can work. However the best examples are where you plan for something to
happen, so you can then go back and monitor it, and evaluate it and equate it to, did ROI
actually come from all of this? But we don‟t know that if we never knew why we were doing it
in the first place.

R: That brings me on to my next point, do these clients come with goals in mind? Do you help
form them?

G: I think it‟s fair to say that we try and help form them. Again, most of the companies already
doing this are at an early stage. For example let me put it another way we get a few clients
coming to us saying we are doing it, we would like to do it better. And one of the reasons why
they can do it better is because they don‟t really what the purpose of doing it for in the first
place is. And that they have jumped in seeing benefit from doing social media, jumping into
Twitter etc etc. But because they actually have not got a defined objective right from the start
they will never achieve that kind of full potential, if you like, because they don‟t know what
they are really working to they are just kinda in it, rolling with it if you like.

R: It‟s hard to reach a goal if you don‟t know what it is.

G: exactly, exactly, so part of our remit in working with companies on a one to one basis is to
kind of work through the strategy and crucial to that strategy is to find the objectives. You know
why are we doing it here, is it just to raise awareness of the company, or is it something specific
your looking to sell more of something, new markets your looking to move into, or you want a
different share of your audience demographic, whatever, what is the reason behind it. And that
reason helps structure a lot of the „what we do‟ rather than just ok let‟s jump into social media
and have fun, which they do anyway but you know you need to measure it in order to quantify it
so…

R: From my perspective of trying to figure out what kind of goals clients come up with, from
your experience are the monetary in nature, do they come saying we want to increase revenue or
are they more intangible stuff such as brand awareness?

G: To be honest I think, and again whether or not this is a chicken and egg type scenario, most
of early stage stuff we do in the workshops etc. is to try to sell the point that social media is not
a solution to go in and suddenly make quick bucks from. So most of them realise that it‟s not
about, dramatically and very quickly increasing bottom line. And I think because we have kind
of explained to them what it‟s about, it‟s about longer term awareness, building relationships
and as we say at the end of the day social media is simply talking, or simply you as a business
talking to your customers and your end users or whoever. Talking to people you don‟t go into a
meeting or a networking event and talk to people and walk away with their cash, you talk to
them you build rapport you build interest you build trust etc. all these things, which ultimately
will lead to business i.e. ultimately will lead to more cash in your pocket but it doesn‟t happen
there and then.

R: Do you find that a hard sell, because in a lot of my interviews they say it‟s a long term
perspective and it‟s hard to explain otherwise.

G: It depends who you are talking to within an organisation. And on the side regarding the scale
of the organisation, without sounding overly stereotypical larger organisations which have a
very specific hierarchy within them which arguably are not where things are moving to in
todays kind of world, but with those types of organisations it‟s harder, because everyone has a
role, everyone reports to senior management and line management and everyone is looking out
for each other and certainly, you know the marketing department just want to use this to market
it and their definition of marketing is just to drive sales and then you have go the IT department
and is it an IT thing? Is it a marketing thing? You know what is it? I think it‟s an easier sell to
smaller more dynamic businesses who kinda get this kind of approach to business anyway. And
especially the businesses who are small enough or wide enough to realise the true value of the
long term relationship. You know most, look don‟t get me wrong see if you start a business and
you sell a load of stuff and make a quick buck with longer term sustainable businesses it‟s all
about having repeat business and repeat customers and you don‟t get that no matter what type of
business you‟re in unless its focused on having A) a brilliant quality product that they will want
more of and B) having the services to support the relationship kind of behind that. Because
business is done on a people basis. People do business with people. They don‟t typically buy
one brand and stick to it no matter what the brand is, they will often be basing on
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recommendation and basing on a particular salesman or whatever. So how we try and sell it
from very very early on is it‟s about the value of simply talking, of simply communication and
trust and all that builds.

R: I was reading on your website that you offer dedicated social media marketing campaigns,
so if a company wanted you guys to help and support them, even if money is not the direct goal
how do you, or what kind of methods do you use to monitor performance?

G: Yeah I mean monitoring it is again dependant on what they are actually doing. I suppose we
can take one step back and say for the majority of companies doing this without a plan, without
a strategy it generally means that A) they do no monitoring or B) they do very kinda dip you toe
in the water type of monitoring. Again it all goes back to monitoring based on what the
objectives are. If they were doing general monitoring, we got mentioned 50 times this week on
Twitter, big deal you know, has it actually achieved anything it was meant to achieve? Again or
remit, to set the scene a little bit, in any sort of social media strategy planning or helping run a
campaign, our remit is always, and it sounds a little bit almost like we shoot ourselves in the
foot, but I do believe in it and is why I make sure we do. The ultimate goal for us is to always
hand control back to them and it shouldn‟t be about us running their social media for them. Yes
it can be about us helping them set it up, helping them, coach them through the early stages,
doing some of their tweeting, Facebooking blah blah blah, for them based on the objectives set
earlier on. But ultimately it has to be about handing it back to them.

R: that seems to make sense...

G: Exactly, and a lot of companies and marketing agencies still don‟t get it. The true value of
this comes when people see that it‟s the company talking, not when it‟s the company‟s
marketing or PR department...

R: because you mentioned before even a lot of the social media campaigns with consultants and
stuff, there is a visible disconnect.

G Absolutely and we can spot them a mile away, we have said to companies who, don‟t get me
wrong because at times we, you know, want to introduce ourselves to some extent, but we have
said to this organisation we know that you‟re not doing any of this stuff, we know that it‟s
clearly coming from some third party, why? Because we are not daft! You know we cans see,
it‟s a very kind of…….

R: Clinical?

G: that‟s the word I was looking for. Clinical approach and they are doing this to drive sales
they are doing this to do nothing but flog product or try to make sales or whatever and there is
no voice coming out. T doesn‟t need to be personal stuff about the MD but it needs to be the
voice of the company. So are goal, no matter who it is, whether large clients, we work with
Glasgow Airport to help them with their tweeting and all this stuff and they do a great job with
it, but initially yes that was a lot of us helping them, us doing some of it and so on. But the point
we put on things is that we coach them through it to a stage whereby they are fully confident,
they get it, they know the objectives they know why they are doing it, they know how to deal
with issues that come up while doing it. Because it has all been defined in the strategy and the
planning, and working, I hate to use the phrase hand holding but, helping for a certain period so
that at the end of the day they can go off and do it. I really do believe do it has to come from
them, otherwise it simply seen as an advert.

R: It doesn‟t seem sustainable if it‟s not.

G: yeah you‟re exactly right.

R: In what I am studying, and researching, in terms of ROI. There is a bit of a debate about the
scope, what the „Return‟ aspect should mean. Some people say it‟s strictly in terms of money,
money in the bank from social media. If you are talking about ROI. And others say it‟s about
different aspects it‟s about engagement, reach and influence and these aspects. What would you
say?

G: I will cop put and sit on the fence. As I say very few companies, some are, but very few see
any quick financial benefit from doing this kind of stuff. Some do, depending on what they do
and how they do it. For me it is much more about the kind of, I use the term longer-term but it
doesn‟t need to be a long term. It is much more about the reach, much more about the brand
awareness, much more about extending your company‟s reach out into different markets or
furthering it into existing markets. It‟s about the influence you have within social circles, again
all the metrics you will have heard of the Klout and all these types of things. Yes they are
important, but at the end of the day if all of these things are increasing and you are still not
seeing financial benefit, something‟s wrong. So which is why I believe it‟s a mixture of both,
it‟s about the immediate building of influence and reach and all these types of thing which turn
into profit at some point. Otherwise what‟s the point? You can have the best word of mouth in
the world and everyone is raving about you but if you‟re still not able to prove that all of that is
making a difference to the bottom line then arguably what‟s the point? And again I agree that
there are some kinda gurus out there, to use a horrible word because there is no such thing, who
will say there is either no money to be made and it‟s all about building brand awareness, and
that‟s just nonsense because you know that‟s arguably most forms of marketing don‟t return a
quick buck but the whole the point of any marketing always is to remain in business, to grow
your business. So ultimately it has to always come back to profit, but anyone who goes into it
with the goal with the strategy, right we want to double sales, we want to double profit by 100%
doing social media. That might be one of the outcomes of it, but I would never that be used as
the objective behind it. Because otherwise really you are risking losing the…you know halfway
through this six months we have not doubled sales, were you going to double sales no matter
what you did? It‟s about way more than that.

R: Because I think of it as in the perspective of within a large corporation, and there is a

marketing department that‟s trying to justify let‟s say a social media budget, it must be difficult.
Because even if these things are in-direct how do they actually link to sales? Sales may have
increased because of another reason.

G: Correct, I mean you exactly right, your right. I would also play devil‟s advocate and say you
know more traditional marketing like an advert in the telly, which traditionally companies are
more than happy to do, less now of course given the demise of that and the increase of social
media etc. My argument would be how can you measure that? It‟s very difficult.

R: Or a billboard ad.

G: Yeah a billboard on the street anything like that. The argument is, and it‟s simply because its
new there is a fear, however look at what else you are doing and how can you justify that? It‟s
about a holistic approach to business. Yes we put up three billboards and we put up a radio ad,
and a television ad and you know ten years ago, and over that period of 3 or 4 years we can say
what the turnover was, but it wasn‟t just down to any one of those things, it was down to those
and a few others and just growth in general. And I think social media is a bit like that. But one
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of the reasons why I think we see „well we need to measure it is simply because it‟s new‟
whereas in fact the older stuff was not measurable either. However saying all of that I actually
think that you potentially can measure it even better than some of those old methods, because it
is 1‟s and 0‟s...

R: Digital.

G: Now ok what you measure is often a bit, on a tangent a bit, kind of abstract, but you can
measure links back to your website, you can measure what you are putting out there, is it
engaging, you know this term „engagement‟ measuring engagement, and how do you do that,
through a number of things, a number of analytical approaches, and things you‟re putting out
there on Facebook and Twitter, are people clicking on them, tweeting them are people
forwarding them on, and all of these can be measured because it‟s all digital. Other than, well I
saw an ad on the telly and I told three mates, and their marketing agency will never know that!
Whereas me forwarding it through a digital medium, yes it‟s still somewhat intangible to some
extent, but can be monitored and measured, and like, don‟t get me wrong I have seen a lot of
good real integration with Google Analytics etc. So actual ways to prove that a tweet delivered a
sale for you. You know it can be integrated and really woven in, and again, it doesn‟t mean
another dozen people bought through the exact same methods but not come through the path
were you intend to prove it. So it is much more of a holistic approach, measuring engagement
yes, measuring website traffic whether its measuring hits you know on your on blog, are the
comments up? Are you engaging with people to communicate with you, to chat to you?

R: So would it be fair to say that because of the vast array of metrics and analytical tools that it
has the potential to be more easily measured than some traditional forms of marketing?

G: I think you can prove you are measuring certain things, you can prove far easier that you
know a something you sent on Facebook, delivered one hundred people to your website. That‟s
painfully straightforward and simple, it‟s a link that gets measured, or whatever that‟s getting
tracked. Whereby if you stick up the same on a billboard you have no idea how many people
look at the billboard. This is off on a tangent but we once put a billboard on the back of a bus,
we got a good deal, and in actual fact it turned out to be one of the best bits of advertising we
ever did, and not because it was actually very good for us but because we paid for 3 months and
it was on the bus for a year and a half!

R: haha

G: Clearly the bus never got that many people wanting to advertise on it, they just never took it
down. So a year and a half on the back of a bus! But the point to all of this is we, put it this way
a lot of people who already knew NS Design, jokingly said oh I see you‟re on the back of buses
now. Now by that very reasoning people who didn‟t know us were also seeing the buses. The
one bit of confirmed business we got from it was when I guy phoned us from his mobile phone
and said „I am currently looking at the back of your bus, I need a website‟. Now, that was ONE
confirmed contact...

R: One concrete link...

G: In a year and a half. Now we know that there was more to it than that. You know we didn‟t
spend that amount to get one client, or potential client from it. We know there is a lot more...

R: But in terms of proving it...

G: yeah in terms of proving it was the only link we had. Now as I said, the same advert, not
quite on the back of a bus, but stuck onto Twitter or whatever we will be able to measure on an
instant basis, on a real-time basis, how many people that‟s sending us. Now of course you then
need to say, sending the traffic is not enough, that‟s when clever integration with analytics can
help because then you can monitor what they are doing on the site and actually, see if they are
going to do what you want them to do. And if the objective is to sell stuff which it can be, have
they actually done that? Through your campaign of tweets or Facebook or whatever so you can
begin to integrate the whole thing. Saying all of that, it‟s about general measurement it‟s about.
I mean there are a number of tools out there I‟m sure you have come across some yourself, there
is Klout the online tool, and there are things like the Twitterlizer which measures twitter tweets
and so on. They are never going to be perfect, especially from a marketers point of view,
because they never say doing this delivered a thousand pounds in sales this week, that‟s never
going to happen. However what they are good for I believe is monitoring against yourself and
indeed your competitors. What does it mean? Well it doesn‟t really matter what it means, but
you can get a figure on engagement. So our engagement this month is 20, well what does that
mean. Well that means that if we do more of this we want the engagement figure to rise. Now
yes, at the end of the day it still just a figure, what does it mean, of course there is still a whole
load of other questions to be asked, but you can track performance, you can track simply doing
things better, you can track better engagement this week than last. Why? Because we did X Y
and Z last week that we didn‟t do the week before.

R: So could I advocate a baseline approach, because if you can measure with these metrics then
when you try something new you can see the deviation?

G: Absolutely, and because a lot of these tools will also allow you to, and because most of this
stuff is so transparent, especially Twitter and so on, you can stick in your competitors and you
can see what they are doing, you can see what your direct, um you know if you sell widgets and
you have got one main competitor you can track what they are doing and look at their approach
and kinda learn relatively from it.

R: It seems especially useful because of your web design roots, is there a way of optimising web
design so that it better facilitates social media monitoring?

G: I think now more and more, I don‟t think it‟s a case of doing it better it‟s simply a case of
being aware of social media and integration. You know it‟s no longer a case of we have a
website we have a twitter page we have a Facebook, you can begin to integrate these things so
that in actual fact it doesn‟t matter if they are interacting with you on your website because its
plugged into Facebook, with your Twitter Feeds pulled in. So it doesn‟t matter if they never
visit your website and only interact with you through Facebook or whatever. So I think the key
to it all with integration is an understanding that in actual fact, again depending on the type of
business and what your trying to achieve from it. Where they are getting the data is no longer
important, it‟s the fact that they are seeing it, they are integrating they are interacting with it.
For the same reasons we used to say to clients you know if you‟ve got a video stick it on
YouTube, why? Because somebody might find it on YouTube, through that come to your site.
And I know often the excuse was, well YouTube is used by everybody it‟s a bit cheesy, fair
enough but are you wanting to miss out on potential numbers that would have never have found
you through your site, and all of these other social media channels are just that other channels.
So in terms of web design, I think the integration aspect of it, again we have a lot of companies
coming into social media but not doing the basics of informing people why they are on there.
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You know we have got a twitter page, that‟s not enough, flag it up on your own website, or pull
in your latest tweet or whatever, so that you‟re using your own site and your own influence so
that the visitors who are already visiting you on a regular basis are seeing your other channels
through your site. So in terms of design, it is more just a case of about integration and flagging
up through part of the design process, that you are on Twitter that you are on Facebook etc. etc.

Put it this way another way to look at it is most of the mock-ups we do now for clients, where 5
years ago, 2-3 years ago, it wouldn‟t have. Nearly every one of them now includes the social
media badges somewhere. With maybe, depending on who the client is and we know maybe are
already doing social media, designed with latest tweet on the homepage type of thing. And I
think that kinda says it all about where we see it and where most clients realise it, they need to
be adopting now.

R: But is there a way of doing it so that you make it easier for tracking purposes? So you design
the webpage that you can funnel social media on to certain pages, for like example a company
that sells a product. Is there a way to monitor where they are coming from?

G: to be honest I think it‟s more of just best practice site linking it‟s about making sure that you
do have some tracking facility on there anyway. Whether it be Google Analytics or whatever,
whether monitoring slightly more out of the box Google analytics whereby you place certain
tracking codes on certain clicks and all these types of things which is all fairly straight forward
thing to do. So that you can again at any time state without any reasonable doubt that the
website pushed 100 visitors to the Twitter account, and likewise vice versa with links based on
Twitter back to your site and so on. It‟s simply about getting the best practice for creating these
linkages and I suppose at a top level making sure that us building it and for the client going
forward are aware of the importance of statistics. I mean it‟s a dull subject, we often do a load
of workshops on a very web design general nature and we ask people who already have
websites when the last time they looked at their stats was? And of course as you can imagine
one or two will put their hand up, most of them wont. Its dull and boring but so important, being
able to track certain stuff to be able to prove, to be able to want to be able to prove, and to have
any hope of measuring anything there needs to be capability of it in the first place. It‟s about
trying to instil that ethos of, any linkages you make here there wherever make sure that there are
track-able and they are connected so that you can monitor them.

R: Do you think some of the difficulty that arises is because although the metrics and the
statistics are available, each company, each firm‟s situation needs a different application of
these metrics and its understanding which ones apply and how to use them.

G: I do kinda agree with that which is why one of the things I do think is most valuable, which
may sound like a bit of a cop out, is the baseline approach. There are no hard and fast rules
unlike certain sectors who all use the same analogies for measuring things and you know, take
advertising for example cost per click and what your click through ratio is and all of that, none
of that applies any more there is no hard and fast…

R: Yeah because with pay-for-click advertising the link is... you know you spend this much
money and...

G: You get the click! Exactly, whereas with the benefit of social media is that, that it isn‟t just
the click. And so I do believe it is a very holistic approach and knowing where you are as an
organisation in terms of certain criteria. What they are the ones that are important to you, so if
it‟s important that we get a client‟s contacts a day through the contact page rather through a
general email or whatever then all of the tweeting all of the things will be driving people to the
contact page so that we can monitor and measure the enquiry forms that have come in through
from that. Again which is all rolled back into Google Analytics etc. so there is a paper trail
almost. Knowing exactly where they came from, where they end up, and end enquiry that we
get in the inbox the next day. It can be directly traced back to where it came from. But I think
the baseline approach Is the right one for most organisations in that there are no rules anymore,
it‟s about improving yourself as you go, and potentially improving yourself against competitors
when you put them under the same criteria.

R: Thanks that was great.

G: yeah make any sense?

R: Yes! And it all helped...

G: And I will deny it all in court!

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C.4 Interview with Julie Tait form Culture Sparks.
R: Could we start with you telling me a bit about yourself and your background.

J: How long have you got?

R: Haha as long as you need!

J: I suppose I would consider myself to be a commercial manager. My background I sin

education and commerce. So essentially I have qualified from an education, have a degree in
Sociology and social research, and then worked commercially for a multinational. Started in
sales and contract negotiation but then in my working life after that was really more applying all
of that in the leisure and entertainment industry. So tended to have spells either working
commercially within the private or public sector. And lastly working within some kind of public
sector but it‟s like this, where we rely on public funding, either coming through memberships,
from arts associations which are publicly funded or it‟s in a building facility where the majority
of the revenue, or risk is underwritten by the public purse. So The Lighthouse was a commercial
director and they were generating revenue in order for The Lighthouse to promote its aims of
educating people about architecture and the design industries. Whereas here this is about
applying skills of commercial knowledge and research to help organisations innovate
themselves to be much more effective. Personally I have this sort of ying and yang I suppose,
on a personal level its pretty soulless working for money all the time. Don‟t get me wrong
everybody needs to get their bills paid, but you do kind of go well I‟m making money for
somebody else.

R: So you have more of a personal satisfaction in this area?

J: Yeah and you know it sounds altruistic but I have managed to keep going, and this particular
organisation is a complete and utter blast. So ultimately, its managing the combined objectives
that organisations have which are, to be able to generate revenue and hence reduce the burden
on the public purse, create a reach and an audience which is broad, because it is fully for the
citizens and public. And it is also artistic which is about essentially promoting the product and
the creative industry. Intellectually I find that very stimulating, commercially it‟s dead easy you
can do the money bit, it‟s not always dead easy but you can do the money bit. You sell stuff that
people who have got money want to buy, and you sell more of it to them and you create more
stuff that people want to buy s you don‟t have to worry about the other two aspects. Nobody
cares who is sitting in the seats if you have a commercial focus. But if you have a combined
focus you do care who is sitting in the seats. And then artistically well anyone can sell Robbie
Williams, a monkey can sell Robbie Williams, there is a market for him but creating and
generating innovative and different artwork across the whole spectrum is interesting.

R: You have this public sector perspective, so how does social media fit into that?

J: Oh I mean we have changed our whole organisation to be more much more porous. I think
the exciting bit about the social media for us, because we are in the audience business, that‟s
what we really are interested in is how you can increase reach and participation and engagement
at any level. Therefore that‟s a tool, it‟s a tool that you don‟t have to go from top-down, you can
go from top-down bottom-up and everything in between. And you can create a two way form of
communication and I remember what was really appealing is the whole issue with authenticity,
it‟s not filtered, and nobody is editing it you are getting it full on the face. The real exciting

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thing about the social media world is that you can create that interaction and get directly to
people at volume. I don‟t mean „loud‟ but wide.

Whereas with traditional forms of marketing they are very expensive...

R: and very different in nature. They are one-way...

L Yes broadcast absolutely...

R: Whereas social media is a conversation, or at least that‟s how it‟s described.

J: Yeah, and within the market research world things are often very historical, and quite
quantitative and rationalised. Take medical research for example, take four rats and put them in
a glass box and generalise for the whole population. What‟s really interesting about this is that
you can test things quite quickly in the social media world, opinion wise. You can see how
things are trending, quickly, so you have almost got a litmus test, very cheap, very immediate,
that wasn‟t there five years ago, three years ago. And its potential has not really been fully
achieved.

R: When public sector, or the clients you work with come to you do they have a clear picture of
the goals they want to achieve when working with you through social media. Do they set
objectives out, do they think of them before hand or do you help form them?

J: I set the objectives for the organisation and the business plan. I set the objectives in relation to
market demand. So if I think the people in my market are funders, so Creative Scotland and the
Local Authority, in relation to audience participations and will assure that what we delivery and
what‟s in our objectives is what they want. It‟s kind of a no-brainer because if we don‟t we
won‟t get money. But more importantly it‟s kind of holy trinity. There is Creative Scotland, the
Local Council both of which have very clear objectives and are developing over time, but we
also have our members who and there are over 40 of them who buy our services potentially. So
nobody sets our objectives we set them ourselves. Clearly our objectives are set on satisfying
the need of these three stakeholders. If we are not adding value in any one of these three things
nobody will give us money, it‟s not a gift. So in that sense it‟s a return on their investment. So I
trying to place messages in their mind regarding satisfying the objectives, and as long as we do
that, better than anyone else, I don‟t think it‟s a gift I think it‟s a good return on their
investment.

R: So ROI is definitely part of justifying funding for you?

J: yes but interestingly that is not the language they would use, they being funders, this is very
much new language now.

R: Why is that why has it changed?

J: Creative Scotland I think for various reasons are trying to make a link between public money
and outcome, and you seem to find that people start at the cuddly end of the spectrum, they go
what is my money buying and how can I justify it, what does that pound actually get? And
that‟s why three years ago we did a bit of a majoring in economic impact studies.

R: But even though it‟s the non-profit side it seems that it is important to have the ROI thinking.

J: I think that argument has been won on a stakeholder level, I think it is more important and I
think that organisations will have to demonstrate their ROI. Whether that‟s a social return on
investment or a return on investment. So if I spend a pound with the Tron Theatre, the Tron will
have to be able to articulate how that pound has returned across the objectives that have been
set. And I think for some organisations that is quite a challenge. Not because they are lazy or
incompetent it‟s just not the way the majority of people think.

R: Would you say that‟s just because you‟re generalising about Arts organisations?

J: Well yes I can only generalise about them, I can‟t speak for anybody else. Our experience is
with Arts organisations that range in scale from such and such a company to national
companies. People will talk a lot about output, so you say to people well what‟s your impact
what are you doing? Well we produce three shows a year, run an intern scheme for young
artists, we have developed technicians, and the transition is that that is output. What is the
outcome of those outputs is what we are really after. So the analogy for us would be, ok with
have analysed your or done 40 research projects, but what is the outcome of these forty research
projects for the organisation we have delivered them to. Have audiences grown, have audiences
become more engaged.

R: what the impacts are of your outputs.

J: yes and people don‟t do it because it‟s difficult. It‟s difficult as a research methodology but
also because people are not good at doing the long-term stuff and these are long-term
conversations. Whereas if you say what‟s the impact economically they will go, sales, or
performances. Here is the budget for my performance.

R: This kind of brings us to metrics which is a big part of my research. Now there clearly are a
lot of them and many applications that measure different things. In terms of Culture Sparks,
what kind of metrics do you use? And as a public sector organisation do they differ?

J: well this is an area for development really, as you say there are a lot of techniques but there
are not really a set of recognised metrics that are applied. And I have to do my own work here
and work with other partners and apply the metrics they use in other sectors so in the world of
community education it‟s much more about that. So currently the metrics we would use would
be qualitative ones, to try to get a handle on some of that stuff that‟s not on the balance sheet.
And usually that‟s just the standard stuff like observation, conversation and focus group work.
And in our first year we did lots of that. I don‟t get the sense that the one off methodology is
actually measuring the return on impact. So what we are also in the business of doing is
providing these metrics for people and really a benchmark sort of thing where we are really
focused on but they tend to be quantitative.

So, before you would be able to say to somebody, what‟s the profile of your audience? And
they would say well you know they look like this and behave like this roughly. Now with recent
investment we bought software and are able to extract postcode data in terms of the lifestyle
point of view very sophisticated way relative to how others sectors use it. We are then able to
get a colour coded map of here is your audience, here is what it looks like here is how it behaves
using various other metrics.

R: Are you able to pull information via online channels?

J: yeah what we are developing now, because that‟s quite successful as it builds visibility to an
audience as opposed to building visibility to a product. S you are saying well you have this
product on the stage but what do the audience look like? So you then make that visible as a
group. And now we are saying well the reaction to that is really positive because people get a
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real sense of outcome. Now what we are doing is developing these kinds of metrics for the
social media world and it‟s all stuff that you probably know about yourself. Using all the tools
out there to help people and it‟s quite a bit of work for us actually because we have to do that
for the forty odd organisations we cater to. This gets you into the interesting conversations
about, how many followers are good?

R: There is a lot of discussion about that on the web.

J: absolutely, as people are trying to go... I really still don‟t get Twitter? And then also you point
about how does that engagement affect what happens in the accounts, does it give me any
money in the bank, or does it just give me a whole lot of really interesting conversations?

R: I read stuff specifically about big brands, and people argue what is the use of a million fans
on Facebook if they don‟t know what these million fans mean or do or feel about the product.
And it seems it‟s an area where more is not necessarily better.

J: Well my guess, or entrepreneurially for us, that is the space that we need to be in. Because
they are not, in terms of the Arts, in terms of our niche, we need to be able to say well what‟s
our view on this for you and with you? Let‟s have a conversation about that because what
people are doing now are moving into this world because they have to. But something really
positive about moving into it not because you have to but because actually it‟s worth it, because
they have lots of places where they can spend their time and money. People are now going oh
god now we have to have a digital person, oh we have a digital person and our lives will be
saved! When actually no you don‟t but you do need to have a sense of is seven hundred
followers good? And now that I do have seven hundred followers, what impact is that having on
things I need to make an impact on. So does it have an impact on box office or footfall? Does it
have an impact on what people are saying to me? Then you get into a whole other series of what
do the conversations mean? So you‟re looking at content analysis in a way that you would say,
how do you analyse a focus group? What does that conversation online mean and is that good
and I need it?

J: Another thing I found is that on the investment side of the ROI equation there is the time and
effort required to engage in conversations and produce content. Do you count that investment,
say in a large company, as the hourly rate you must pay these people on the social media team?

J: And what you‟re raising here is a really important issue, which maybe for a large corporation
with a brand and marketing team. Which is generally not the feature of an arts organisation or
production company. The nature of relationships and roles will change quite fundamentally so
traditionally in a brand company you would have marketing and development and all of that.
But actually who is going to be creating all of that content? In the past it would be the marketer,
when now it is moving towards everybody in an organisation and that‟s what we are finding. If
organisations are going to change, it brings up how do I change and what is the benefit of me
changing. Because it‟s a huge change for organisations. Once you open it up you can‟t switch it
off.

R: yeah, we saw what happened with nestle and the advert attacking Kit-Kat for destroying the
habitat of orang-utans. They had people managing their Facebook page being pretty rude to
customers who were voicing their concerns and it was a terrible PR disaster. So it seems hard
for a big brand to control its voice when entering this world of social media and some seem
scared.
J: Exactly, and it‟s quite interesting, your point about voices is a really good one because there
are so many „sacred cows‟ being slaughtered because of all of this. Because in a traditional
company the voice is decided by the director generally, and in the creative industries by the
work. So if you open up and say what is the voice of the organisation, and then you say
everyone has to be taking part in it. They might say I can‟t control that in the way we would
have done.

R: You even find in big organisations they think, oh we have to be here, like you said, and just
put somebody to handle all the social media. And there are a lot of things to handle which
seems to require quite a bit of effort.

J: And I think for arts organisation that don‟t have huge resources, they very much are saying,
particularly as a generation of leaders going, I get it, I know we should be doing it but I‟m not
really sure why we are doing it, and what we are going to get out of it. And particularly in the
performing arts, they go there is all this conversation, and I have tied up one whole staff
member plus all the money but I‟m not seeing it translated in the box office. And what bottom
line is if I don‟t have anything in the box office, don‟t have anyone sitting in the seats then I
don‟t have revenue. If I don‟t have revenue then I don‟t get funding.

R: Is this a real problem you face?

J: It‟s a problem yes that dilemma about prioritising resources, yeah for sure.

R: Because that directly link to what I am trying to find out, for these kind of people asking
those questions, and in your case in terms of box office, how do you justify normal activities
and within the social media sphere to say that no, it is worth committing resources to?

J: Well that‟s why for us it‟s an area to help people understand how as an organisation they
could change. For example the Ambition Project, which I won‟t bore you to tears with now, that
project is about a million and half worth of public money to help and support arts organisations
to change. So that they are able to embrace the digital world, and that‟s about half a million
pounds in direct grants based on a business case of how you are going to change plus, two
years‟ worth of training and events and support to help people move through.

R: so there seems to be quite strong public sector back in this?

J: Yes. And so the wave I‟m coming behind, the curl is well if we are doing it we have to be
evaluating more what the impact of it is and the outcome for that, not just saying it‟s a good
thing. It‟s kind of a no-brainer...

R: But difficult..?

J: well it‟s a no-brainer to know that if you‟re not using this…even in terms of tablets coming
out now. If you are not using this you won‟t be anywhere. It doesn‟t matter what business you
in.

R: Yeah, finally I know we talked about metrics a little earlier. But if you could expand further
on what kind of metrics you use to sort of quantise the whole evaluation procedure?

J: If I tell you I would have to kill you!

R: Is that right! Haha

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J: We are working on a few things to visualise it. I mean we are not the first to do that, data
visualisation is quite an interesting area. I don‟t know if you know LinkedIn, the do a LinkedIn
cloud which is really interesting, and that‟s really a metrics more just a way of visualising the
metric. Hmmm I guess I could only give you a list of tools really... Again sometimes you can
get paralysed by analysis, you don‟t need five million metrics, I could run a retail outlet that
turns over half a million, in one page with five indicators.

R: There is a lot of writing about how people look at „eyeball‟ stats but a lot of them are empty.
You may have this many visitors but you don‟t know how many purchased things, or they use
eyeballs to calculate averages which don‟t necessarily become accurate figures that you can use.

J: yeah and part of the thing is getting people in to evaluation it‟s not a natural muscle,
especially not in the world of arts. If you think about how it operates you tend to do it as an
event or an activity and then you‟re into the next one. We are trying to encourage the learning
of, well what was the impact of that particular thing. So just take the web, people go oh great we
got a website, oh we got twenty thousand hits, and it‟s the same thing. I mean there‟s a metric
but how many unique visitors did you have, where did they go and where did they dwell?

R: Where did they come from?

J: Yeah so you need to take analytics on that, which is one part of their work which is the
website.

R: And each company is going to apply that same stat and it is going to apply in a different way.
It‟s about understanding how it directly applies to your situation.

J: and you would think it is obvious but it‟s not. I mean our initial website we spent ages doing.
But where to people go, we are in a business to business setup, so we analysed what the two
most important things for folk. It was who we are and jobs. Also the things we say like the
gossip pages. We invested in an archive, resource, archive materials, the whole cataloguing
thing, library, which was completely useless so we just had to bin it. Then we turned the whole
thing on its head to what the focus should be.

R: It just seems unfortunate that you can‟t really know that until you have gathered all this
information.

J: Yeah and when you are working to a particular company that‟s where your loyalties are. You
are not really interested in sharing with everybody else. But we are going, you‟re doing the
exact same thing as we did and its having the same outcome, let‟s not do it all again.
C.5 Interview with Jason Falls
Interview with Jason Falls

Conducted via email

1. Firstly, please tell me a little about your background and what you do in the world of
social media.

I'm an independent social media and digital marketing consultant. I work with mostly medium-
and large-clients, but the occasional tech start up as well. My focal points are online market
research, strategic planning and education/training. Implementation, support, optimization and
measurement are normally outsourced or referred on to the client. I focus on the big-picture
with clients.

My life in social media started, as most people's, as a user. From bulletin boards trading games
and the like in the late 1980s to my first blog ... a newspaper column I self-published starting in
late 1997, early 1998. I was a communications person (public relations by trade) who loved the
web and technology. My career took me through a niche focus in American college athletics
public relations and sports journalism until 2006 when I began working as a PR account
manager at a national advertising agency (Doe-Anderson). There I began talking to clients about
the emerging world of social media and my status and expertise grew quickly. I had the
advantage of working with some global brands (Jim Beam, Maker's Mark) and did some
interesting things early on to establish some credibility.

2. Many organisations fail to clearly identify their goals for social media marketing. What
kind of goals should a business consider when designing a social media strategy?

Social media marketing can serve about six purposes for an organization. 1. Enhance Branding
and Awareness 2. Protect the Brand's Reputation 3. Build Community/Loyalty 4. Facilitate
Customer Service 5. Compliment Research and Development and 6. Drive Sales/Leads.

Once businesses know what social media marketing CAN do, it's just a matter of deciding what
they want it to do for their brand.

3. Some hold the view that ROI is to be considered strictly in monetary return. However
aspects such as increased brand awareness or reach can have an indirect financial impact,
should these be incorporated into ROI?

No. ROI is a financial measure. I can't tell you what the ROI of social media marketing is. No
one really can in finite terms. What I can tell you is what you can get out of it. Sometimes it's
money. Sometimes it's awareness. Sometimes is happy customers. Sometimes its influence.
Some of those don't have appropriate cells on a spreadsheet.

4. Does the fact that it is very difficult to directly link sales with social media marketing
make the efforts of calculating ROI less worthwhile?

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No. And I don't think it's very difficult to directly link sales in all cases. Certainly, if you don't
sell a product online it presents challenges, but you can easily measure web traffic (and thus
online sales or conversions) from social outposts, blogs, etc. If you can tie those to later sales,
you can measure a figure that fits into an ROI equation. You can also survey customers to know
where they interact with or find you and know that X percent are "social media contacts" vs Y
percent that are met through traditional means. Not surprisingly, all case studies I've seen that
differentiate show a much higher value customer (higher sales, conversion rates, etc.) from the
social media audience. So sometimes it's not what you got from it, but how much more you got
from them compared to traditional customers.

5. Could you suggest examples of how an organisation can better link revenue to social
media marketing?

Tracking web visitors and online sales, leads, requests for information, etc., and knowing where
people are coming from. But you also need to be sure to track the same information with your
traditional mediums as well. If your executives are all hot and bothered over determining an
ROI for social media, but they aren't measuring the ROI of their billboards or radio or print ads,
then they're isolating social media activity unfairly and biasing their information.

You can also do what CareOne Financial Solutions did ... separate social media customers from
traditional captures and measure the value, not the take:

http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-customer-value/

Getting into the areas of reputation, branding, etc., it's not easy to put a number on it, but every
time you reach out to a detractor and stem the negative tide of a conversation around your
company, that's worth something. Keeping customers happy and engaged ... that's worth
something. And those activities need to be championed up the corporate ladder, too.

6. Finally, how do you see the ROI field within social media marketing evolving in the
coming years?

I don't see it evolving much because the C-Suite cares about three things: revenue, cost savings
and customer satisfaction. The social media types don't understand well how to champion what
they do into those three categories. Until the executive level understands social media is more
than a revenue generator (and sometimes isn't positioned to be a revenue generator) and the
social media practitioners can figure out how to frame their successes in big-picture ways for
the executives, we'll still be fighting the uphill battle of understanding that it's not always about
ROI.
C.6 Interview with Jacquie McCarnan.
Conducted via email

1. Firstly, please tell me a little about your background and what you do in the world of
social media.

In 2009, while working for an international online video game company as a Recruiter, our
company was shut down by the Korean owners and I found myself out of work, newly divorced
with 2 children to raise.

I needed to find work quickly. So I used a combination of internet and viral marketing to carve
out a niche for myself as a community liaison for a controversial develoment project in the town
that I live in. (btw, the Princes Trust has featured the project as an example of sustainable
community growth and the future of planning for sustainable communities)

While working in that capacity I realized that using the social network to get the word out about
our project could prove to enhance our national and international coverage considerably. As a
result of the Facebook, Twitter and Linked In accounts I had set up for the project I was able to
extend our reach and get the project in front of some heavy-duty decision makers.

In the end, our own municipal gov't shot down the plan but the Greater Metro Vancouver Mayor
and Council will quite likely override that decision because they have heard of the project and
know that it is completely in-line with Vancouver's bid to be the greenest city on earth by 2020.

When my role ended (with our muni gov'ts vote to not approve the project) I was, once again,
out of work. I didn't want to work 9-5 for a large company again as it took me away from my
kids for too much of the day.

I began to research how to make money online and found a million "get rich quick" schemes
that did not align well with my core values.

I began to realize that some of my strengths lie in writing, assessing someone's web real estate,
marketing, philanthropy, etc. I wanted to find out how to put it all together then it dawned on
me that I could become a Social Media Strategist and help people use the internet to build their
business, to improve visibility for their charity or project and to provide value to others.

I set my mandate to only work with companies that I felt were providing something of value to
the world. The companies I work with are either environmental, philanthropic or socially
conscious in some other fashion.

I love doing this because I feel that I am shepherding people through a tough-to-understand new
era in marketing. I feel there are so many ways to do it badly and if I am able to help someone
do it well, provide value to the world in some way then that is a very satisfying career.

2. Many organisations fail to clearly identify their goals for social media marketing. What
kind of goals should a business consider when designing a social media strategy?

Again, I always approach a company with the question "what value do you provide through
your web presence?" If they can't answer that I go on to ask questions like "what do you hope to
gain from an online presence?" "what do you want to gain from a social media campaign?"
88
One of the biggest issues I face is the fact that most companies believe that social media is the
job of the marketing department. It's an easy mistake to make since all promotion in the past has
been marketing. However, since SM is a 2-way street (when done correctly) it's not enough for
marketing to go it alone. Each dept has their own mandate and agenda and leaving the entire
company look/feel/attitude to one portion simply does not make good sense.

If a company wants to have a successful social media campaign they need to determine first
what they can do for others before they try to decide what they want it to do for them.

There are a million examples of companies who just toot their own horn in the SM realm and
pay the price. i.e. BP oil.

Traditional marketing is telling the customer you're great. SM is giving them something to help
them determine you're great and to tell everyone they know. It's far more powerful as a brand
builder but many companies fail to recognize that.

It's my job to ask the right questions to get them thinking in the right direction.

3. Some hold the view that ROI is to be considered strictly in monetary return. However
aspects such as increased brand awareness or engagement can have an indirect financial
impact, should these be incorporated into ROI and how? (As your formulae suggested)

In my book the R in ROI should stand for "return" not "revenue". As such a company has to
determine, ahead of time, what the goals of the campaign are. Is it to make money? If so they
probably should not be using social media to do that simply because any SM campaign that
does not put the client/customer first is doomed. (insert thunder and lightening effects here :)

If one sets up the campaign so that others are getting value out of the information shared they
will share it with friends and the campaign will go viral. That should be the goal, provide
something so useful and great or funny that people will want to show it to their friends and
colleagues. It then follows that the more brand awareness, the more engagement, the more sales
or potential for sales.

That said, constant monitoring of the social network and search engines is required to see if
that's working or not. If not, try something new.

4. Does the fact that it is very difficult to directly link sales with social media marketing
make the efforts of calculating ROI less worthwhile?

You'll always run into number-crunchers who believe 100% that sales are the key to success.
That sort of ties into the greed is good phenom of the 80's when making the almighty buck was
the absolute be all and end all of every company mandate.

I hope that SM can mellow that out a bit. I realize it sounds a bit granola-ish to say that I hope
companies can learn that they are there to serve the public not take all their money.

One of the exercises I have C-level execs do is write down why they got into the business in the
first place. Did they do so because they had a passion for making money? Likely not. Most will
say that there was a time when they loved the product or service and wanted to share it with as
many people as possible. At some point the money gets in the way, the CFO screams that the
bottom line isn't healthy enough, the board looks for blood. If it were me, I'd walk at that point
because, contrary to popular philosophy, money isn't everything. :)

5. Could you suggest examples of how an organisation can better link revenue to social
media marketing?

My advice would be to use a traditional ROI formula but to tweak it to include things like
employee retention, brand awareness, engagement on social media sites. I would also encourage
companies to find out what their rep is online. Monitor their brand and see what people are
saying and engage in those conversations. There's a great new service by TED called
conversations where a company can go in and use their brand to establish their expertise on any
given subject thus adding to the value they provide online.

I believe that the "adding/providing value" proposition is the key to improving everything about
a company‟s bottom line. Add value, more people trust you, more people share your value with
others, your brand becomes a household name, you sell more. It just makes sense to me.

6. Finally, how do you see the ROI field within social media marketing evolving in the
coming years?

I'm a bit of an idealist so I hope that Social Media in general will become a platform with which
we, as ordinary citizens, can hold the companies that operate in the world to a higher standard of
service and quality. I think that SM has created a power shift from big business to citizen
(again, see the BP example)

In the past supply and demand ran companies. Now it's going to be a bit more complicated as
demand will be driven by brand reputation and SM will be where that rep is built. Therefore the
Return on Investment in Social Media will have to include how the company is viewed by the
public because if they behave like jerks and their competitor provides stellar product or service
you can bet the ROI for company 1 will be less than company 2.

90
 APPENDIX D – Ethical Approval Form

Ethics Review Request (Undergraduate) Approval is REQUIRED BEFORE data collection is started

1.) SAVE this form as an Word document FIRST, then add your information to your 3.) Have them tick the box that they APPROVE it.
copy. Please give it your filename of: Forename Surname.doc
2.) Have it REVIEWED by your supervisor 4.) THEN your supervisor should forward it as an WORD attachment to j.wilson@lbss.gla.ac.uk

Required Data For Departmental Use Only

Short-form Date Date FEC FEC
Ethical Research Approval Request Form MRes MBA MSc MA Submitted Submitted D1 D2 D3 D4 Ref Date Appeal
Researcher category (check one box + date) 27/01/2011 4/2/2011

Proposed Start Date: 01/02/2011

Project Title: __ Evaluating Return on Investment for social media marketing campaigns
Anticipated Completion Date: 27/02/2011

Location of study- interviews, data collection, etc At the most convenient location for the interviewee

Researcher Name and Student Number, Name __Rudy Kawmi

Student Number __0706828
Ethics Policy: http://www.gla.ac.uk/lbss/research/ethics/index.html Confirm I’ve read and agree to abide by the University’s Ethics Policy

Academic Supervisor (Application should normally come from them- must be Name __ AC Muir
checked first and box ticked) Confirm Read & Approved YES

Research Question(s) To investigate the current practices regarding how return on investment is calculated for social media marketing campaigns, as well as outlining any difficulties
What is the research intended to find out? or limitations that may be present, in order to formulate a list of criteria that can be used to calculate ROI.

Research Design / Methodology: What data is to be gathered and what
methods will be used to collect and analyze it.
The data will be gathered in structured interviews at locations the interviewee’s find If a SURVEY is undertaken, please identify the
convenient. The interview will be audio recorded. Some background information will be asked TYPE of subject:
(Current occupation, experience in the field, any relevant academic credentials, etc.) with the General Public (NOT Glasgow University Students)
majority of questioning being in regard to their views on return on investment practices in Social Science Students ONLY
social media. Due to the nature of the responses no statistical analysis will be made to the Other Glasgow University Students (outwith the Social
answers. Sciences)

The subjects of the research will be leading professionals or academics in the field of social media. A snowball sampling method will be
Briefly describe who the subjects of this research will be and how
used. An initial contact will be made with Mr. Mike McGrail, Mr. Stephen McKee and Mr. Greg Kelly where any other potential subjects can
they will be recruited/selected.
be recommended.

Briefly describe how subjects will be assured of their anonymity or Subjects will be required to have their name and details contained within the dissertation. If they wish to remain anonymous any data
the confidentiality of their responses, if appropriate. collected from the will not be used.

How will consent be demonstrated?

Briefly describe how subjects will be informed of Ethics policies and
their rights.(Consent forms should be submitted on completion) When using questionnaires this statement should be included on each one: The
Individual respondents will be asked to complete a consent University of Glasgow operates according to Principles of Ethical Research which
form before each interview takes place. can be viewed on:
Are there any ethical issues around 'sensitive' issues as outlined in http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/businessandmanagement/ethics/index.html
Para 10 of the Principles of Ethical Research?
Check the appropriate box. Yes No
D.1

Ethical Considerations

In accordance with the University Of Glasgow‟s research Ethics policy a formal submission
was made for ethical approval prior to any collection of primary data. The form submitted (See
Appendix D) included information regarding the research topic and what the questioning was
trying to achieve. Once Ethical approval was approved, the interview process could begin.

However certain steps had to be taken into account regarding the formation of the interview
questions. Firstly consent forms were drawn up to achieve transparency regarding the purposes
of the research to the subjects. This meant highlighting on the consent form that the research
gathered, including personal information such as their names, will be presented in the
dissertation text. If they wished to remain anonymous they were encouraged to either opt out of
the interview or make a request to keep personal information anonymous. The motivation
behind including names and details regarding employment history was to better analyse the
responses given in relation to their personal expertise and experience in the social media field.

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