We May Not Need Social Media Measurement After All

The Paine of Measurement

Okay, that might be taking things a little too far. But social media is becoming so obviously a success that there is no longer a need for sophisticated measurement tools to demonstrate its ROI. Organizations and the people who help them communicate are realizing tangible benefits from social media every day. For example, a 16% increase in sales (P&G’s Old Spice campaign), a 90% increase in requests for quotes to an insurance company (comparethemarket.com), and a $650,000 increase in revenue (Humane Society of the United States). These solid and substantial results are so frequent now that I think the clamor for social media ROl will soon go away...

That’s not to suggest that in the future we won’t need to monitor and understand what the market is saying about us. But having to prove that magical “ROI of Social Media” will make as much sense as demanding to know the ROI for your phone system or your IT department. Rather than a separate “phenom” or a separate department, social media will be simply an accepted way of doing business.

We’ve always said that you can learn more from failure than you can from success. But the problem is that right now everyone wants to measure social media success—even before they’ve defined what success looks like. I for one look forward to the day when the PR person or the social media team stops looking for the proverbial gold star or A+ to justify his/her existence and instead looks at social media for the insights and knowledge that it offers. Maybe it’s time to time to learn from what social media can and can’t do.

Social media also makes our everyday lives richer in ways that can't easily be measured. For example, at a presentation recently, someone asked for a good example of a B2B client who had used social media effectively. I tweeted the question and got a quick a reference to a Boeing program from David Meerman Scott. Boeing saw that tweet and immediately sent a link to a page that described the successful program. Within five minutes that page was displayed on the screen in front of an audience of 100 people. Such communication could not have happened without social media. Will that quick action help Boeing sell another 777? Probably not. But it does enhance the company’s reputation for being responsive and listening.

At some point companies stopped having to justify their investments in telephones, typewriters, and computers. Sometime within the next five years that will happen with social media.

Here's wishing you large measures of success,

Katie Delahaye Paine is CEO of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine is a dynamic and experienced speaker on public relations and social media measurement. Click here for the schedule of Katie’s upcoming speaking engagements.

 

Comments

[Jeff Molander]

Katie...
Respectfully, I think this is wishful thinking on the part of an outdated PR industry. I'm betting you'll agree since you're not outdated ;)

Now is not the time to be measuring less. It's a time to, as you say, pick your desired outcome and measure the ability of social tools to deliver against it.

Because in the end a few savvy organizations **are** using social media to capture leads and sales -- reliably. And they can prove it. Like Burger King did http://vimeo.com/13734605

Again, respectfully, the PR business has been built on flimsy measures and loosely attributing the intangibles it creates to leads and sales for decades. Buzz, image enhancement, positive sentiment are evolving. And I say this as a former practitioner.

So I understand the desire to not, as an example, incorporate direct response metrics (there, I said it).

Direct response is the key to unlocking "making social sell." Building direct response into the social media mix allows for tools like Facebook to discover latent demand, nurture and capture it.

** Working WITH the stuff that traditional PR provides us. **

Yes, for CEOs or CMOs to invest in social media as they do telephones and computers would be wonderful -- but only for PR practitioners who want to continue attributing their work to sales increases or lifts in customer satisfaction. Blindly. And I know you're not one of those! :)

The essential, needed, valuable skills that traditional PR brings to "social" serves a critically important purpose. Would you agree? But its purpose is not limited to "social media."

Now is the time to be measuring more -- and finding ways to connect all the relatively intangible (valuable) things PR gives us with the sales funnel / customer life cycle... yes? I guess I'm asking this but I'm also saying it because that's what my research is uncovering lately.

Thanks for considering.

[Queen of Measurement]

Jeff, far be for me to suggest that we measure less. My point was that measuring social media to justify its existance may not be necessary a year from now. It is becoming so ubiquitous and in many companies such a significant force in how the do business (not just sell stuff) that many of the metrics that we are trying to implement today may seem silly a year from now.