Social media has come of age. Marketers now have the ability to augment their traditional marketing approaches with rich behavioral and activity-based targeting that should increase marketing ROI significantly.

However, businesses are facing an uncomfortable truth: There are no “best practices” for measuring a successful social media campaign. Crowd behavior is dynamic and context-specific, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to build a “one size fits all” solution.

A structured approach to capturing, measuring, analyzing and refining marketing strategies in near real time is essential to executing a successful social campaign. Initially, however, companies need to invest in infrastructure to make such a learning cycle possible.

---

Invest in Data

---

Measuring the impact of social media campaigns is systemically different from that of traditional marketing campaigns. Since the medium touches all the aspects of the customer purchase cycle, a holistic measurement of awareness, transactions and brand impact is essential.

Additionally, social media is a two-way communication medium and businesses need to invest in listening capabilities that capture the activities of their existing or potential customers online. Several paid and “freemium” tools that monitor online chatter can be found online.

While data is abundant, it is by nature unstructured. Integrating listening data with internal web behavior metrics captured by JavaScript tags, customer care logs, brand surveys and transactional data can enable a business to get a 360 degree view of the activities of customers across all of the purchase touchpoints.

---

Real-Time Monitoring

---

A typical online conversation has a life span of about one to two days. As a result, it is imperative for companies to respond to conversations in nearly real time. During this short window, they not only need to understand the context and content of the conversation, but also create an effective response mechanism. All of this underscores the need for real-time monitoring and analysis.

Companies like Dell and Best Buy are adopting different strategies for listening to Internet () chatter. These investments help keep a finger on the pulse of every conversation active on the networks.

---

Sentiment Analysis

---

Text mining and sentiment analysis are the flavor of the season for social media analytics and a common complaint is that the current tools are not able to classify a high percentage of the comments about your brand.

Step back and think about a conversation you had in the last 30 minutes. How many statements in that conversation were unambiguously positive or negative. Not many, right? Getting a 20% sentiment mapping for individual comments is a very high number.

On the other hand, think about the same conversation; Was the overall sentiment of the conversation positive or negative? That is far easier to cognitively classify. If businesses shift their focus to a conversation-based, rather than a comment-based sentiment analysis, they will be able to get a far better read on the aggregate sentiment of online chatter.

---

New Metrics

---

The need for improvisation and identification of new metrics is high. Currently, three categories of metrics need to be developed to enhance our understanding of social activities.

• Metrics that help understand conversations and engagement (e.g. aggregate sentiment, conversation heatmaps),
• Metrics to spot influencers in a community (e.g. influencer score, Klout score), and
• Metrics that help in measuring holistic impact of social media activities on the business.

---

The Interplay Between Buzz, Branding and Sales

---

Measuring the impact of increased chatter for your brand might not always translate to more revenue for the business. Measuring cause and effect between buzz, branding and sales might show different dynamics for different product groups. For example, the Old Spice social media campaign saw an 800% increase in Facebook () interaction and a 107% increase in sales. The numbers are related, but not necessarily 1:1.

---

Testing Mechanisms

---

Social media is a fertile testing ground, and businesses need to appreciate the importance of a robust testing protocol for social media-based actions. Having a mechanism to measure the effectiveness of comments will ensure that businesses can learn quickly and adapt to the social dynamics.

A key point to remember is that the instance and context of the test is as important as the test itself due to the temporal nature of conversations.

Some of the tests that can be conducted are:

• Who are the right “influencers” to target for a particular product or service?
• What is the right time to message these influencers?
• What is the impact of competition activity on our buzz?
• What is the impact of traditional marketing on social media and vice versa?
• What are the type of comments that work for selling a product?
• What are the type of comments that work for selling a service?
• What are the right pricing strategies?
• How should the business tap into current affairs?

---

Behavioral Segmentation

---

Behavioral targeting dramatically changed with online advertising, and now social media can take this effectiveness to new heights. Activity-based segmentation is far different from traditional demographic segmentation, and this is typically driven by a difference between the purchasers and the consumers of a product. Businesses can draw parallels from traditional marketing (targeting kids so that they can influence their parents) and build a unique social targeting mechanism.

---

Crowd Behavior

---

Businesses have tried to artificially stimulate a conversation by mettling in their own communities or creating artificial hype. This approach usually fails miserably. They need to understand that social networks emulate real-world interactions, and excessive policing of user generated content can be detrimental to the natural growth patterns of a network.

Math, business technology and behavioral sciences are the key ingredients for good decision making. Understanding organizational dynamics, flock behavior and complex adaptive systems are all directly applicable to social media. Integrating analytics with a deep understanding of how humans interact in a sociographic and psychographic sense can help a business stimulate a conversation within a community, or trigger flock behavior amongst customers.

---

Integration Into Existing Business Models

---

Once companies understand the impact of lead indicators, like buzz, on transactional metrics, like revenue, they can include such metrics into their forecasting models and predict short-term revenue with greater accuracy. Additionally, since a good social media campaign will improve the brand health, the long-term impact of these campaigns can be assessed.

While every business wants to understand the impact of its social media spend, it might not be so easy to integrate that into a media mix model. A good social media campaign might manifest itself in increased brand scores or customer loyalty and will impact the lifetime value of the customers more than the immediate transactional metrics. Including indirect metrics like buzz or sentiment might be one way to capture social behavior.

---

Product Design

---

Social media can be a direct line of communication with the end user of your products. Businesses can leverage this very effectively in product design by soliciting input from the end user on what features they prefer in the product. Getting feature specific intelligence from the customer can help in building a product that caters to most of the population and also helps in building a sense of loyalty among the user base. Good examples of this include Ideastorm, Vitamin Water and Fiat.

---

Conclusion

---

The framework above is the first step in helping companies understand the who, what, when and where of social targeting. The obvious next step is to integrate all this knowledge into traditional marketing and CRM.

La clave de Social Media hoy es poder resumir los datos del trabajo realizado en métricas confiables que aporten a medir el alcance de los objetivos de negocio utilizando estas tecnologías y metodologías.

How is good service measured?

It’s the catchphrase of metrics: you are what you measure. Our hypothesis is that by measuring good service at a C-level within an organisation, service will improve and profit will naturally follow.

But how exactly do we do that?

Net Promoter Score (Reichheld, 2006)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) was developed to attempt to provide a strong relationship between customer relationship and profit. It is based on customers’ answers to the question, “how willing would you be to recommend this service to a friend?”. People rank themselves on a scale from 0 to 10, with 9 and 10 being regarded as “promoters”, 7 and 8 “passives” and, below this, “detractors”.

The score is then:

NPS = % Promoters (9,10) – % Detractors(0-6)

This measure is useful in that it is easily understandable, and can give a good benchmark for how people view your company. However, in terms of actually linking customer experience to profits, it is often viewed as overly simplistic: what people say they will do, and what they actually do, is often quite a distance apart.

Value Equations

Value equations try and look at value to both external (customers) and internal (employees) to the firm.

Value to Customers = (Results + Quality of Customer Experience) / (Price + Access Costs)

This is an interesting formula, as it implies that value is not just about the end product of a transaction – such as receiving a coffee – but about an overall value to the transaction involving the quality of the coffee, the quality of the experience (dirty, speedy, nasty staff, uplifting) and the cost to the customer of getting this experience (walking 3 blocks).

Furthermore, because of the “mirror effect” described above, we also need to look at the value for employees:

Value to Employees = (Capability to Deliver Results + Quality of Work Experience) / (1 / Total Income + Job Access Cost)

What is interesting here, is that rather than income being the most significant factor in improving value, the quality of the work experience, and capability to deliver results, has a larger effect. When trying to make an impact on your staff’s well-being, reaching into the pocket is not always the best way.

These measures are deeper and more interesting than the Net Promoter Score. They reveal more about an experience and its relationship to a transaction, and could be extrapolated into profitability. However, they are also very difficult to quantify, and to standardise across organisations.

Forrester Customer Experience Index

Forrester provide an external measurement of customer experience, via an index that provides a numeric grade based around three questions:

1. Meets Needs Index: Thinking about your recent interactions with these firms, how effective were they at meeting your needs?
2. Easy to Work With Index: Thinking about your recent interactions with these firms, how easy was it to work with these firms?
3. Enjoyability Index: Thinking about your recent interactions with these firms, how enjoyable were the interactions?

This measure is useful, as it is easy to benchmark against top level companies to see where your company scores in comparison.  We would recommend this as one of the first steps to measuring your organisation’s customer service levels, and a great inspirational goal for your company to aim for.  Follow the same methodology as the report to have comparable results, as outlined on page 25 of the index:

• Gather responses from at least 100 customers for a good sample size;
• Those customers should have used your service within the last three months;
• Gather responses to the above three individual indexes using a five-point scale — ranging from a very negative experience (1) to a very positive one (5);
• Calculate individual index by taking the percentage of customers who selected 4 or 5, and subtracting the percentage of customers who selected the 1 or 2;
• Calculate overall index (CxPI) as the average of those individual indexes;

This will generate a comparative figure that can be compared against others in the report.

I have a Blackberry now, but I'm in an Iphone State. The ipad counts? ;)

As the food recall list grows and food imports flood into the US, it may be time to revamp America's 70-year-old laws on food safety.

Estos emprendedores techie tienen un ADN particular que los definen. Son talentosos y creativos, con imaginación para resolver los retos. Además, nacen pensando en el mundo y con la proyección de que su compañía sea global. Buscan nichos de mercado que no estén atendidos por empresas grandes y que les permitan despegar rápidamente. Para ello, se basan en la creación de valor. La Argentina, claro está, tiene componentes positivos, como la consolidación de un ecosistema que impulsa a emprender, pero también suma desafíos, como la falta de una política coordinada de subsidios y un todavía incipiente desarrollo de fondos de venture capital.

Así, dentro de la nueva ola de entrepreneurs se destacan los casos de Geelbe, Popego, Full Dimensional Entertainment, Doppler, Guía Óleo, Socialmetrix, Neolo, Keepcon, Farmsphere, Creation Flow y Flipaste.

Muy buena nota del cronista!

Excelente comparación entre los usuarios actuales de la aplicacion para Facebook FarmVille y los agricultores de la vida real

La más innovadora
FarmSphere: una red social para saber de dónde viene la comida

Un grupo de emprendedores argentinos está relanzando FarmSphere, un sitio que aprovecha las redes sociales para hacer de nexo entre los consumidores y los productores de alimentos. Y permite que los diferentes eslabones de la cadena productiva puedan hacer negocios y que los usuarios finales conozcan de dónde vienen los productos que ingieren.

Farmsphere, the best innovative startup in 2010, by RedUsers. One of the 10 best startups od the year!

No tenia el dato que Skype tenia 590 millones de usuarios, dato no menor, con algun esfuerzo de desarrollo podría ocupar un espacio de negocio mayor o adicionar servicios complementarios ampliando su cartera de productos.

Si bien las aplicaciones de geoposicionamiento tienen mucho por crecer, no creo que alcancen la masividad de facebook o los serivicios de webmail (hotmail, yahoo y gmail). Por el lado de myspace, todavia no entiendo como sigue existiendo ;)

Linkedin creo que guarda una proporcion razonable respecto a otras redes sociales por estar segmentada a profesionales, y twitter creo que es la que tiene mas por crecer dentro del listado de la infografia.

Como se ve en la infografia Google creció en oferta de servicios a fuerza de adquisiciones, pocas veces a base de desarrollos propios, lo que demuestra que no siempre el éxito llega por la creatividad de desarrollo in-house, sino por tener un modelo de negocio claro y avanzar en línea con eso.