I've just read an article at econsultancy.com stating that almost 80% of European marketers are unhappy with their social media measurement.
This seems true for almost anyone out there actively engaged in experimenting with social media today, but according to the same article, about a third of marketers considered the problem of measurement to be somebody else's job! While traditional job silos may have their plus points in organisational design, there will always be issues related to information flows between silo's, as well as assuming that other departments are responsible for certain pieces of work per those sometimes dreaded job descriptions! So if it was considered to be someone else's job, I would imagine that the organisational structure of most respondents is probably traditional, and therefore that the respondents probably thought it was the job of Finance to do the calculations, which is probably fine if the marketers let Finance know in the first place!
Back to the article though. While marketers seem pretty good at measuring volumes and traffic, what they are increasingly interested in is brand sentiment and the value of traffic generated by these channels. In terms of these requirements, brand sentiment as a social media measurement challenge has already been tackled by a variety of companies, while measuring the value of traffic remains important.
However, with most reports suggesting that social media is currently better at engaging with your customers rather than for sales, my recommendation is that the brand equity of social media interactions is what should be measured in financial terms, rather than looking for actual sales measures for sales which may not be there yet. At least with this measure, you have a yardstick of measuring future cash flow potential, which is after all the objective of creating brand equity in the first place!
This seems true for almost anyone out there actively engaged in experimenting with social media today, but according to the same article, about a third of marketers considered the problem of measurement to be somebody else's job! While traditional job silos may have their plus points in organisational design, there will always be issues related to information flows between silo's, as well as assuming that other departments are responsible for certain pieces of work per those sometimes dreaded job descriptions! So if it was considered to be someone else's job, I would imagine that the organisational structure of most respondents is probably traditional, and therefore that the respondents probably thought it was the job of Finance to do the calculations, which is probably fine if the marketers let Finance know in the first place!
Back to the article though. While marketers seem pretty good at measuring volumes and traffic, what they are increasingly interested in is brand sentiment and the value of traffic generated by these channels. In terms of these requirements, brand sentiment as a social media measurement challenge has already been tackled by a variety of companies, while measuring the value of traffic remains important.
However, with most reports suggesting that social media is currently better at engaging with your customers rather than for sales, my recommendation is that the brand equity of social media interactions is what should be measured in financial terms, rather than looking for actual sales measures for sales which may not be there yet. At least with this measure, you have a yardstick of measuring future cash flow potential, which is after all the objective of creating brand equity in the first place!
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