Think of your favorite model or metrics for measuring social media activity. Flip through Olivier Blanchard's presentation on social media ROI. Now, with that in your head, read Tom Davenport's 2007 book, Competing on Analytics. How far do you get before realizing that the enterprise analytics crowd is asking some of the same questions as the social media crowd, but looking for answers in different data? What if the two groups met?
When we asked CIOs to identify their visionary plans for enhancing their enterprises' competitiveness, business intelligence and analytics was the top answer, selected by 83 percent of our sample... "Facts drive decisions," said an Insurance CIO. "Plans for imbedded analytics need to enable data capture at the customer touch point."
— IBM's 2009 Global CIO Study (via KDnuggets)
What would happen if you were to analyze social media data alongside operational data to look for insights in the interaction between what people do online and what they do with your company? You could measure the ROI of marketing in social media, but that's a defensive move (protecting your job/budget). Beyond learning what works and what doesn't, what would you learn by looking at the data together?
Are you doing this now? I'm looking for companies to interview for my research.
Hi Nathan,
I agree with your comments, there needs to be a thorough and holistic view to analysis of all results pertaining to Social Media and at a core level the overall ROI it provides an organisation.
I think that there are so many intangibles with Social Media as well, depending on the industry you work in and you can't just make a general assumption that what you are doing is or is not working. In my line of work, people may only visit our destination once or twice in their lifes, however thats not to say they wont encourage all of their friends, colleagues to come here.
Feel free to email me if you want to chat further.
Rich
Thanks, Rich. No doubt, understanding the business you're in is the first step. Metrics that work for routine purchases won't apply to once-in-a-lifetime categories.
If we consider the measurement of social media in the marketing realm to be in an infancy, the measurement of social media in other business units is still an unrealized criteria.
A lot of our auditing process at 123 revolves around the application of traditional measurement with a focus on moving the needle using social media.
Being in Seattle, we are fortunate enough to be surrounded by large corporations that are actively moving through datasets (Microsoft, Amazon, Costco, Starbucks, etc) and that is allowing our northwest business culture to ask some really interesting questions on social media ROI.
Granted, the real essence of the change is simply maximizing communication channels across business silos and connecting them with points of business impact.
Drop me an email and we can chat some more.
Nathan,
You certainly make an interesting point here. With so much technology now available for companies to analyze data available internally and externally, each sector now has tools at their disposal to maximize their productivity in new ways. PR, marketing, and communications agencies are perhaps the new optimization modeling experts.
However, it is difficult to say whether there could ever be one unique way to maximize social media interactions. Monitoring tools can help identify advocates and detractors, along with specific communities within which these influencers are active online, but the metrics are not necessarily as straightforward as those of optimization modeling.
Michelle
@Synthesio
Michelle, I'm definitely not driving toward a single, perfect method for measuring or optimizing everything. Instead, I look at this as an "and" question: what other questions/problems can this data help solve? As marketers explore the value of online data, CIOs are looking for more value in operations data. Putting them together is another "and" case that's waiting to be explored.