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An invaluable guide to finding and optimising your elusive social media ROI PLUS sophisticated analysis of cross-industry measurement strategies, must-have scorecard metrics and mistakes to avoid
Who should buy this report? hief Marketing C Officers (CMOs) ocial Media S managers and directors orporate C communications professionals ustomer Service C professionals arketing M departments within SMEs
Our methodology
We interviewed 11 brands including Siemens, Adobe, World Wrestling Entertainment and Hewlett Packard, delving into cross-industry similarities and differences in social media ROI and measurement strategies. An additional six interviews were completed with social media authors and agency contacts. This was coupled with an industry-wide survey sent to the US, Europe and Asia, aimed at a greater number of brands, and looking at approaches to measurement and ROI, attitudes towards these strategies and what are their prevailing scorecard metrics.
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An invaluable guide to finding and optimising your elusive social media ROI PLUS sophisticated analysis of cross-industry measurement strategies, must-have scorecard metrics and mistakes to avoid
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An invaluable guide to finding and optimising your elusive social media ROI PLUS sophisticated analysis of cross-industry measurement strategies, must-have scorecard metrics and mistakes to avoid
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engagement, but not the kind of that engagement. Heres how Kaushik breaks down engagement into degree and kind: Degree: the degree of positive or negative engagement lies on a continuum that ranges from low involvement to high. An engaged person is someone with an above-average involvement with his or her object of relatedness. Kind: customers can be positively or negatively engaged with a company or product. A more in-depth examination of [engagement by] kind would reveal its content, usually a mixture of emotional states and rational beliefs, such as in the case of positive engagement, sympathy, trust, pride and so on. If these definitions seem overlapping at first, the difference becomes clearer once we start to think of degree as being largely quantifiable and kind as being about largely qualitative judgments. On the web, engagement by degree can be measured by metrics like frequency of visits, depth of visit, outcomes (a download or full/partial video view). According to Kaushik, measuring engagement by degree involves more complex approaches, including surveys, likelihood to recommend (a strong proxy for engagement) and customer retention over time (months of data, segmented for online and offline and for various micro-segments of your online population.)
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Influence
If, as Andrew Bruce Smith suggests, there tend to be two approaches to measuring the output of social media investment -- one derived from web analytics, the other from branding and PR -- the measurement of influence certainly traces its lineage to the PR industry. In the pre-web era, influencers were easy to spot: they were typically experts (academics, financial analysts, business leaders, columnists). It was partly the job of publicists to influence these experts, whose opinions would subsequently be amplified by mass media and trickle down toward the broader public. Katie Delahaye Paine, the measurement guru, argues that social media has officially signed the death certificate for this model of influence. (Delahaye Paine, 2011)
Elite influencers
No doubt. But the idea of influence isnt dead. On the contrary, it has persisted online. As early as 2000, the PR agency Burson Marsteller released the first in a long line of reports on Americas e-fluentials, which suggested that the opinions of the most vocal and influential consumers were greatly amplified by the web. (Holmes, 2001) Representing 8% of the internet population (about 9 million users), this group influences more people on more topics than other online users. And, they are eight times more effective at communicating their views than Ropers traditional influentials. From the mid-noughties onward, spurred on by Malcolm Gladwells book The Tipping Point, the ability to identify and sell stories to an influential elite of bloggers became a selling point for many PR agencies. (Gladwell, 2001) In 2006, Technorati, the blog search engine, struck up a partnership with Edelman, the PR agency. On the basis of this exclusive arrangement, Edelman promised to guide its clients through a chaotic world of continuous discussion, learning from the crowd and remixed media where companies must cede control to gain credibility. (Edelman, 2006) Much of Technoratis data focused on the growth of blogging as a phenomenon. Accompanying efforts to identify top 10 or top 100 lists of bloggers were intended to showcase the idea that PR agencies were in a good position to master the dynamics of conversational marketing. Subsequent efforts at measurement attempted to blend this focus on elite bloggers with some acknowledgement of the rapid rise of Facebook and Twitter (frequently referred to at the time as a form of microblogging). (Brain, 2007) Efforts such as these, which attempt to measure elite influentials, have been repeatedly criticised over the years. Yet this is a meme that persists: Technorati is no longer measuring blog-based influence, but its descendants like PeerIndex have adopted a more sophisticated approach to the same challenge, measuring elite influencers across multiple social channels. (Reichenstein) Watts vs Gladwell: Elite influencers vs random effects
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By the time Malcolm Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point, the notion of influencers as a driving force behind the adoption of memes had been around for 50 years or so. In his book, Gladwell dusted down the six degrees of separation experiment conducted by the sociologist Stanley Milgram in 1967 and contextualised them for a new audience. (Gladwell, 2001) In that experiment, Milgram gave letters to 160 people in Nebraska, and told them to try to send the letters on their way to a stockbroker in Boston with whom they had no personal connection, by sending them to a colleague socially closer to the target. Famously, most of the letters arrived at their destination after passing through the hands of six intermediaries. What Gladwell noticed was the way in which half of Milgrams letters were delivered to the stockbroker by the same three friends. These individuals were described by Gladwell as connectors. The rest of us, he argued, are linked to the world through these special few. Gladwells book itself exerted a powerful influence on the way in which marketers started to think about influence at the dawn of the social web. Yet it has also been criticised repeatedly by researchers like Duncan Watts, director of the Human Social Dynamics Group at Yahoo! Research. Watts has argued that Gladwell attributes far too much power to connectors or influencers. Instead, Wattss experiments emphasise the apparently random way in which memes spread through networks. If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one -- and if it isnt, then almost no one can, Watts has said. As the journalist Clive Thompson noted in 2008, the irony of Wattss findings is that since you can never know which person is going to spark the fire, you should aim the ad at as broad a market as possible -- and not waste money chasing important people. (Thompson, 2008) For marketers, this raises multiple questions. One of the most important, in the social realm, is this: should marketers place their faith in what Sinan Aral, an assistant professor at the New York University Stern School of Business, calls active personalised messaging or passive broadcast messaging. The former, says Aral, requires more effort and time, which may curtail their use. The latter may reach more people but may be less persuasive. (Aral, 2010)
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What the report covers, in detail: References Contents Table of figures Executive summary Introduction
Chapter 6 Conclusions
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