You'd think many business people wouldn't dedicate time or paid personnel to a media initiative unless there were some way to track its progress. And yet, a recent study suggests that willy-nilly approach is the norm for social media adoption among many firms today.
Mzinga, a social media-oriented software as a service company, released a study in September that polled 555 business people from different disciplines to see how they were using and tracking their social media initiatives. The most shocking result: While more than 60 percent of respondents had some form of ongoing social media initiative in place for marketing, inter-business organization and customer service, 79 percent of them didn't bother tracking the results.
"The biggest reason they aren't measuring ROI is the same reason they have a hard time measuring it in a lot of things," said Isaac Hazard, director of strategic consulting for Mzinga. "It's a complicated thing; it's hard to extract the value of what comes out of social media initiative."
Though many industry experts argue that social media initiatives can be measured like any other medium, the platform's particular one-to-one, even personal nature makes customer sentiment an added, confounding thing to gauge. Luckily, gurus are engineering both scientific and organic solutions to help businesspeople see the bigger picture they're painting with every Tweet, LinkedIn update and Facebook event they execute.
But first, employers need to understand the nature of this brave new platform.
A good start
The businesses who jumped into the online abyss without a plan or parachute need to understand the primary nature of social media before they start to measure its effects. Social media is a two-way conversation, much different than the mass media animal that employs a one-to-many broadcast dynamic.
"Even if you have 500 Twitter followers, it's about having 500 different conversations," said C. Lee Smith, president of Ad-ology market research firm. "So it's about managing (many relationships) through a vehicle."
Of course, relationships take time to develop. Herein lies the double-edged sword of social media. It can be much more credible than more anonymous mass marketing, but it also takes longer to cultivate, and see a holistic payoff. Measurement should happen over time, Smith said. The upside to that relationship, more specifically, is that people would much rather buy from the suggestion of their online "friends" than from the prompting of ads or other mass media.
According to Ad-ology's latest studies on "Media Influence on Consumer Choice," positive online comments in blogs and forums are the media that most affect consumers' choice of restaurant. The second biggest influences were negative comments online. Online restaurant reviews came in third. That should give restaurateurs their first directive for how to monitor social media: Start with the conversations you haven't started.
"Everything has its price, and with social media, it's not money, it's time," Smith said. "If (executives) aren't ready to invest that yet, they have to understand that potential customers are talking about them, so at the very least they need to monitor that conversation, and if someone had a bad experience, correct that, because it's the second most significant thing in a buying decision (for a restaurant). And if they have a good review, share that info with other people."
Some good tools
Those restaurateurs who are ready to invest the time to start applying ongoing metrics have a wealth of options to choose from. But first, as with any other media measurement, you have to establish baseline parameters: What are you measuring, where are you now in that initiative, and where do you want to be in X amount of time?
Social media's No. 1 use for restaurants is in the form of marketing to raise brand awareness, ultimately to bring people into seats. In this sort of equation, Katie Paine of marketing measurement firm KDPaine & Partners said the best way to measure the role social media has played in getting people there is to simply apply old metrics to this new measurement.
"(You have to measure) sort of the same way you ever did before — with sort of your standard survey questions," Paine said. "And give them a couple of options: Facebook, Twitter, newspaper or press. You just have to add the social media option to that (survey)."
She also recommends adding Google analytics to the back end of a company Web site, especially if it's linked to social media platforms. That's one way to see how many people are being driven to a company Web page from company social media outlets, and ultimately to the business.
That may seem like a roundabout way of doing things, but it is only one of several measurements that can and must be taken to see the overall effects of your social media initiatives, according to Mzinga's Issac Hazard. Hazard said there are several overlapping metrics and measurements you want to take, and ever specific and technologically savvy ways to employ them.
"You can use social media to affect a lot of different parts of your business — marketing is one, customer service is another," he said. "Managing your talent through training is another. All of those require a different kind of way to measure return on investment."
For the very important matter — at least from the Ad-ology survey findings — of how your potential customers feel about your brand as reflected on their online conversations, there are some very sophisticated sentiment analysis tools that can calculate, based on semantics, whether people are speaking positively or negatively about your brand overall. A quick Google search will return a bevy of results.
But Hazard reminds that social media is also widely employed to resolve customer service issues, in which dollar-type metrics can be useful — but tricky. Again, ultimately, more than one metric measurement can and should be employed.
"Remember that ROI doesn't have to be in terms of increased revenue, but also in decreased costs," Hazard said. "When measuring the hard ROI in my customer service department … the average cost of handling issues through the call center is $10 to $12, while through a social media outlet, it's closer to 25 cents."
But Hazard also points out that a customer service department itself isn't measured just on dollar metrics, but rather, via customer satisfaction and retention statistics. A similar approach can be employed for social media initiativess
Whatever the operator's goal, then, the point is to assess it from many different angles — just like with a relationship. "Put your initiative in place, then wait a year, and then measure what it looks like then," Hazard said. "On the organic side, measure number of posts, community members; lay that over and make sure it's telling a consistent story."
