At the lovely red rocket café (excellent scones and coffee, free wifi no limits), I spoke of my frustration of not being able to show tangible roi from social media activities.    My last client wanted to see a direct line from social media to the bottom line – which is so hard to do when there are so many other factors influencing the bottom line.   Sure our campaign was successful and the client was very pleased with the efforts – but it was still hard to deal with the desire for a straight line to revenue generation.

This is the kind of tough research and analytics that David’s teams do all the time.  David leads Custometrics, a company that is regularly commissioned to help identify which marketing activities lead to the greatest impacts on brands – thereby adding a significant amount of science to how a marketer should allocate her spending.

David was excellent at explaining what is hard to explain.   Many marketers experimenting with social media have a hard time answering to how effective social media has been compared to other spending.  In the absence of good ROI measurement the effectiveness of social media is not known.  But being unknown is not same as bad or ineffective – it is just that the effects are not known.   Unfortunately – unknown effectiveness might as well be bad as some marketers could default back to traditional and ‘safe’ vehicle choices too early in their exploration.

The other half of the equation here – is getting something worthy of measuring.  If firms are testing social media but not truly understand how create strategies that will make social media work hard – the results will not be stellar.   That’s where I hope to come in. I would LOVE to be the surrogate marketer by playing an acting marketer role creating the digital marketing strategy and execution to fit the marketing and business goals.    I see lots of metric holes and analyzes that if I had access to someone like David – I could really feed.  Drawing a straight line to brand impact and sales volume for instance.  Show lift of baseline.  Separating all other factors from social media to prove success would be a lovely engagement.  I want it and the bigger the better.

I look forward to uncovering the science – I welcome others thoughts here too.

Laurie.

Related posts from Laurie:

Social media metrics — an earlier post about managing corporate facebook pages.

She talks about the importance of allowing people to interact with brands the way they interact with friends and family.

1. Micheal Jackson = 10.2 million fans
2. Barack Obama = 6.7 million fans
3. Vin Diesel (?!) = 6.3 million fans
4. Facebook = 5.1 million fans
5. Megan Fox (already?) = 4.9 million fans
10. Starbucks = 3.8 million fans

I’m certain any customer experience mapping (a.ka. figuring out the customer interactions including the boring painful interactions of in flight experiences) would uncover some issues around air flight safety explanations – so it is interesting to see Air New Zealand take this experience up a notch.

Interestingly,  Air NZ are doing a great job of reusing content assets by uploading to youtube and allowing some viral eyeballs from youtube.     How many times have I tried to get my own companies to think about the reuse of assets online.  I’m not suggesting posting print grocery flyers online in pdf format  (egad – does that actually work?) but using youtube for video is a fantastic reuse.

I’m happy for the body painter that Air NZ is exposing (excuse the pun) the video outside of those who fly Air NZ.