Neoco

Social Media, like most industries of today, is experiencing an increasing pressure for metrics and deliverables upon project completion. It is interesting to meet up and chat about how others do it. Measurement Camp is a public project that is open for anybody and which bring together quite a diverse group of people to discuss how to measure social media activities.

It seems that wanting to measure media is related to how people like to use familiar and perhaps ‘safe’ business terms such as transactions, revenue and customers when taking about returns on investment. And it’s up to the ‘social media guy’ to be creative around how to meet these requirements.

But why is it that no one seems to know how to measure ROI for social media? Could it be that ROI is a business metric inapplicable in this instance?

One of the many suggestions that came up during the last camp involved going back to basics, and therefore monitoring the baseline before and after social media activities. This has proven to work in a few cases where ROI has increased as brand image and customer communications has improved. However, on big projects social media might not have any threshold weight and so it is very unlikely to be measured against the baseline… Also, how do we apply this when the social media activity is no longer new to the business, but rather built in? I’m afraid, this evening Measurement Camp didn’t manage to measure a lot…

Two final notes: Firstly, although this may sound obvious, organisations should really get better at saving buzz and sending over a copy to the RnD department. Talk about valuable leftovers! And secondly, a little bird tweeted in my ear and said that ‘if it easy to measure it is useless’. The debate about how to best measure social media is not over yet!

Tags  deliver measurement camp results roi social media