Ever since the explosion of social media, marketers have tried to tap into its potential for branding and sales. And although the tools and methodologies are starting to slowly catch-up, there’s still not a unified way of measurement. But are we getting metric obsessed to the detriment of innovation?
I recently stumbled upon an equally humorous as thought provoking quote by Nick Pahade of TrueAction.
“What’s the ROI of putting your pants on in the morning? You do it because you look like a douche bag if you walk out of the house without them… There are specific results derived from campaigns.” [source: Media Post]
For every action, there’s a reaction; causality. Simple as that. We just need to be able to measure it.
While I appreciate that there’s a need to be open to new creative ideas that are not already tested and proven in this brave new world of social media, as long as we’re creating marketing campaigns, not art, our job is to understand how to measure the effectiveness of the strategy and execution.
When you’re employed to create value (be that measured in sales or brand sentiment), you need to be able to prove that you’ve done just that, and not merely “5000 fans”.
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Yes! Really glad that marketers are starting to build rigor around the social media marketing processes, goals, measurements, etc.
Like email, search, etc. – the social marketing channel will become more science and less art over time. More putting on pants, less designing funky new styles of pants…
Eric Boggs
http://argylesocial.com
I agree, although at times social media is similar to word of mouth advertising. It’s hard to measure the ROI on that.
What I’ve found to be the key is it’s very difficult to get anybody, especially a business to spend anything without some measure of ROI. This means different things to different organizations. The key is really having clear strategic goals, tracking, and refining.