One topic that comes up in conversation a lot is how to measure the effectiveness of a social media marketing campaign. There was a post recently on SEOmoz titled “Is Social Media ROI Unmeasurable?”.

The shot answer to that title is yes it is, and this is how we measurement internally the ROI of the social media campaigns we run.

Set Campaign Goals
Before you launch any campaign the first step is to always establish the goal(s) for the campaign. Is it to increase sales, visitors to a website, RSS subscribers, etc? Once you have the goals it is much easier to set up tracking. Note that none of the goals from any of our campaigns is to simply increase the number of followers or fans that we have on Facebook or Twitter. These are not goals that give you a good ROI!

So here are several potential Social Media campaign goals and how you can effectively measure them.

Increased Visitor Numbers
This is the easiest and more straightforward goal to measure. What you are asking is “Are there more visitors to my site now than there were before the campaign started?” By using a good analytics program you can quickly and easily break down the visitors by channel using referral data. Who are they? Where are they from?

Increased Revenue
This measurement is surprisingly easy to measure. What you are asking is “Is the business generating more revenue than before the campaign started?” To effectively measure the ROI of a social media campaign, you can use tools like social media only URL’s links or coupon codes that can only be seen on sites like Facebook or Twitter. Or campaign specific 800 phone numbers? These tools separate the sales from other channels and allow us to focus only on the increased revenue that came from social media.

Increased Links
Does the web site, or pages within the web site, have more links pointing to them than before the campaign started. Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer are good sources for before and after numbers.

Increased Brand Awareness
This is the favorite of marketing agencies as it is probably the most difficult aspect to measure. What you are asking here is that while the campaign was going on, were more people talking about your company and/or brand than before the campaign? Measuring buzz is difficult, but some different ways to measure it are mentions on Twitter, Buzz Metrics, and Blog Pulse.

What are you using to measure the effecitiveness of your socal media campaigns?

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Really interesting article in the Boston Globe yesterday on how the Boston Celtics are using social media to not only increase revenues, but also to reach out to fans who cannot see the team live.

What the Celtics are doing?
The primary goal of the Celtics online efforts is to drive people to their web site. Celtics.com features GameTime Live, an application that features real time scores, tweets, and blogging with supporters throughout the world. The team beta-tested GameTime Live during the 2009 postseason, and more than 50,000 unique visitors checked it out during the triple-overtime loss to the Chicago Bulls in Game 6 of the first round.

From the Globe article:

“Now that we’re at this sold-out state, it’s more difficult to get into the game and fans can’t get tickets,’’ said Rich Gotham, the team’s president. “We want to make sure we don’t forget about those fans. We want to keep them interested and keep them loyal.’’

Basketball buffs are demanding deeper interaction, or a “second screen’’ experience, as Gotham calls it. While fans watch the game on television, many are also tweeting and surfing the Internet – traffic on Celtics.com spikes 100 percent during games

“With sold-out games, we have 18,624 people in the building. But we could have over 20,000 online at Celtics.com,’’ said Shawn Sullivan, chief marketing officer for the Celtics. “It’s almost like there is a whole other game going on.’’

In addition to making Celtics.com a destination for its fans, the Celtics are also going out to other places online where Celtic fans congregate; namely YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/bostonceltics)
With less than 700 subscribers, the Celtics YouTube channel is not attracting a lot of attention at the moment. Most videos get around 1,000 views. However, the team recently began distributing exclusive locker room footage on YouTube which will drive more people to this channel and increase subscribers. This is a great example of providing different content for separate digital channels in order to make them more valuable in users eyes.

Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/bostonceltics)
With over 450,000 fans in its Facebook page, the Celtics are the second most popular NBA team on Facebook. Similar to the exclusive locker room video for YouTube subscribers, last week the Celtics launched 3-Point Play, an interactive stats prediction game for fans on its Facebook page.

Twitter (http://twitter.com/celtics)
With almost 22,000 Twitter followers, the Celtics have built up a good following. In addition to Tweeting quotes from press conferences and team events, the Celtics are also using Twitter to offer seating upgrades at games. The picture below was from earlier today.

The Celtics are a really good example of how to successfully use social media. They have a central point of contact (the web site) but they are also visible in the main social networking sites. And on these social networking sites they are investing in exclusive content specially for that channel to attract new fans and strengthen the relationship they have with existing fans.

“The last thing we want to do is sit on our hands,’’ Gotham said. “Our popularity has reached an all-time high, and we want to take advantage of the opportunity to build a bigger fan base so that during leaner times that will pay us back.’’

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I came across a post last month by Rebecca at 10e0 called Is Digg the Google of Social News Sites?.

In the post Rebecca points out some interesting traffic data.

Top Social News Sites Based on Unique Visitors in August 2009:

1. Digg (17.4 million)
2. Yahoo! Buzz (7 million)
3. Propeller (800,000)
4. Reddit (670,000)
5. Mixx (660,000)

Digg was a hot topic in the social marketing field a couple of years ago, but has since disappeared from many marketers playbooks as they instead prefer the “interactivity” of Twitter and Facebook. Yes Digg is a different channel than Twitter and Facebook and some will argue that Digg is not “conversational” like the other two.

That is true, expect that most social media marketing campaigns have very little if any interactivity. Most Twitter and Facebook campaigns are simply providing a link to take you elsewhere on the web. Digg does the exact same thing.

Just as Google is the dominant force in the search space, and no SEO expert would every tell you to ignore Google, Digg is the Google equivalent in the social news space. If your demographic matches Digg, and you are using one of the other social news sites you are missing out on a huge traffic potential.

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Really interesting research data from ad network Chitika, via eMarketer on the quality of visitors from social networking sites.

The Chitika study looked at the quality of traffic from search engines and social networks, and the results were a little surprising. According to Chitika, social sites Facebook and Digg are more likely to send returning traffic to your web site than search engines such as Yahoo!, Google and Bing.

More than one-fifth of users referred to a site by Facebook visited at least four times in the course of a week. Less than 12% of Google-referred visitors were as loyal, about the same percentage as Twitter.

But before you drop that search campaign and jump into Digg, Chitikia had released some earlier data in September that showed that  social media sites are only sending a tiny fraction of traffic.  Basically Chitikia looked at the top sites sending traffic to the publishers in its network and found that Google alone accounted for 76.13% of referrals. Taken together, search engines made almost 98% of all referrals, while social networking sites made up just 0.55%.

That Chitika Study concluded that

“the overwhelming dominance of search engines is facing little, if any, threat from social networks.”

Interestingly, Twitter again scored low in this survey. In July, Twitter was No. 24 on Chitika’s list of top referrers, with 0.05%. By September, it had moved down to 44th place, with just a 0.02% share. Has Twitter peaked?

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One of the most asked questions I get about social media, is how do I get started? Most people are thinking that my answer would be to create an account on Twitter or Facebook, so they get this look of surprise when I tell them to start a blog.

Yes I know that a blog isn’t as sexy these days as saying you are on Facebook or Twitter, but it will generate more sales for your business, then either of those two channels.

I was rereading Gary Vaynerchuk’s book Crush It over the weekend and I was struck by a paragraph in it that explained the difference between a blog and a web site.

Your web site is for communicating logistics and facilitating sales. Your blog is for communicating the essence of your brand, It allows you to expand on your topic in ways that a static web site cannot

I wish I had thought of describing it that way. A blog allows you to go deep, in areas that a static web site cannot. Through video, podcasts, or simple frequent posts, your blog if putting a human face on your company. No longer are you jyts an anonymous URL. Now you are a thinking, engaging company that people want to do business with.

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Great tweet from Michael Brito, aka @Britopian last week on a Study of the Top 15 Brands Social Presence Comparison

The Top 15 Brands as decided by Interbrands and they then looked at the level of presence of each of these brands on the two main social media channels: Twitter and Facebook. From the chart below, it appears that brands are really focusing on either Twitter or Facebook, but few brands are taking advantage of their brand power on both networks.

Here are some of the key findings of study.

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Good interview with Carol Kruse, Vice President, Global Interactive Marketing for The Coca-Cola Co.on eMarketer. Carol goes into some detail about how Coke approaches social media and the challenges that it presents.

eMarketer: Within social media, are you dealing with issues such as how much a Facebook fan is worth and the ROI for various forms of earned media?

Carol Kruse: I think before you have ROI you have to really understand how social media is driving your business. If you’re a traditional sales funnel type of company—if you’re selling something online—you could say, “I know how many sales I got out of that social media app.” We are not a funnel company, but we still need to measure the value of what we do. I can’t measure it in actual incremental sales because I’m not selling something online. It’s much safer to say we are focusing on measuring the business value of different types of digital marketing.

In that context, we are asking whether it’s driving brand health or brand love. Is it driving purchase intent? In some cases, like search and online advertising, we have been able to measure ROI driving true incremental volumes and true increases in sales. It’s the same thing from a loyalty and CRM standpoint. We have a lot of online promotions and online loyalty programs like My Coke Rewards, and we’ve certainly measured the amount of true incremental volume those type of programs drive.

eMarketer: Are you satisfied with the type of metrics or benchmarks that are in place for online advertising?

Ms. Kruse: If you’re going to shift money from one pot to the other, you certainly want to make sure it’s going to be equally effective. Lots of companies would like to improve the ability to measure these new forms of media. I think as a company, we have gotten on board on the measurement issues very early on.

It continues to amaze me that measurement of successful social media campaigns continues to be such a hurdle for companies to overcome. SEOBook had a great post last week on this topic and Peter laid out several different ways thta you can measure a successful social media campaign. And none of them involve how many followers you have on Twitter:)

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I came across a fascinating story on Michael Gray’s blog blog about the TSA and how it used its blog to refute a passenger’s story.

Nic, is a 28 year old freelancing writer who has a 16 month old son. On her blog last week, Nic a post called “TSA Agents Took My Son”.

Her post detailed a parent’s worst nightmare; in that she was separated from her child:

My son was taken from me.
Taken.
My son was taken from me by the TSA agents at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson airport yesterday.

Now when you read the post, you can empathize with Nic. No parent wants to see their child taken away from them, especially by a “government official”. Anyone who has flown since 9/11 can tell a story about dealing with the TSA at an airport.

This is usually where the story ends. Expect it doesn’t because the TSA, which has their own blog (who knew!) decided to respond to Nic’s post, complete with video!

From the TSA blog:

TSA works daily to achieve the balance of effective security and passenger convenience. We diligently review claims of improper conduct. But when inaccurate passenger accounts are made either via media outlets or on the blogs, TSA works to resolve them and present both sides of the story. In this case, TSA has made the decision to post the CCTV video of the incident online to allow for transparency.

After watching the video footage, you’ll see the video clearly shows that this individual was never separated from her baby by TSA. You’ll also see that a lot of the other claims are also unfounded.

The TSA followed several rules of success reputation management

• By having a blog already in place, the TSA was able to quickly jump into the conversation that was happening online.
• If there is bad news about your company or brand, you can either remain on the sideline and let others dictate what is said about you, or you can jump into the conversation and share your side of the story, to make the coverage more balanced.

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Really interesting findings in a Citibank/GFK Roper small business survey that was released on Friday.

The survey of 500 small businesses (less than 100 employees) found that found very few small businesses in the U.S. are using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter for business uses:

• Three-quarters of the small business owners surveyed say they have not found sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn helpful for generating business leads or expanding business in the past year
• 86% said they have not used social networking sites for information or business advice
• 25% said they’re using more online advertising to generate business leads and sales
• 10% said they have sought business advice and information on expert blogs

“Our survey suggests that small business owners are still feeling their way into social media, particularly when it comes to using these tools to grow their businesses,” said Maria Veltre, Executive Vice President of Citi’s Small Business Segment. “While social media can provide additional channels to network and help grow a business, many small businesses may not have the manpower or the time required take advantage of them.”

What I found really interesting from the survey was the difference in social media marketing efforts by geographic region as well as age of business.

What you see is that newer businesses (less than 10 years old) are more likely to be focusing more on social media sites than companies that have been in business longer. I would hazard a guess that the newer businesses are run by a younger generation and are more likely to use sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Worst part of the country for trying social media sites? The North East which consistently lagged behind the rest of the country in their willingness to try social media sites. The most social areas of the country? The South edges out the Midwest slightly across the responses.

The one area of social media that older, more established companies use over younger companies is that they are more likely to read expert blogs for advice.

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I must say I was shocked to read on eMarketer , that a combined 99% of surveyed online retailers currently employ (86%) or plan to employ (13%) Facebook Fan Pages. Doesn’t that number seem a little high to anyone?

eMarketer got the numbers from a “Community and Social Media Study”. In addition to the high Facebook numbers, I was surprised to see that that only 55% of online retailers surveyed have blogs, but 65% have Twitter accounts or plan to be on twitter (26%).

So if my math is right, online retailers are saying that 99% they will be on Facebook and 91% will be on Twitter.

So why rush to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter? Well according to the report, “One of their biggest fears was that customers would abandon their site in favor of one that was more socially engaging.” In response to this fear, retailers are actively adopting social media tools over adding social utilities like a blog, Facebook Connect (43% use today), or forums (27%) to their own sites.

So basically retailers are saying, we are afraid that shoppers will go elsewhere if we don’t have anything that is socially engaging on our site. So if we have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts then we can say we are in the game. Whether they know how to play the game is a whole other post.

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