What's a 'like' worth? Measuring success for social media campaigns

“Dear marketers,” began a recent post on Campaign's Facebook wall. “Can anyone tell me what is social media marketing strategy? And how to analyse and evaluate it?” They are questions that many of the best PR minds in the country are still struggling to find answers for: Agencies know that social media is an essential tactic for brand marketing, but it's still difficult to tell when a campaign is working.

The migration of marketing effort and dollars to social media is certainly not a new phenomenon. The Asian Digital Marketing Association reported that online advertising spend in the region for 2010 was a staggering US$16.8 billion – and that number was forecast to grow by 12 per cent through to 2015. With a glut of cash in the sector, PR firms throughout the region have been attempting to refocus the spending power of their clients on viral ideas, rather than media buys, for the last few years.

As the value of 'earning' media space rather than buying it becomes more and more integral to the marketing equation, the fight to change well-entrenched client silos, championing the advantages of digital over traditional, is being fought by PR executives in boardroom pitches every day. Even as companies increasingly embrace new methodologies, however, consistent performance indicators are yet to emerge.  

David Ogilvy once said, “Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn't sell much of anything”. In traditional marketing terms, that might well have been the case and nobody would have been any the wiser. But when it comes to company Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and YouTube campaigns, the ability to trace online sales right down to their Google search roots is very real. Analytic technology is incredibly accurate and return-on-investment tracking can be impressively progressive. The problem, then, is helping companies make heads or tails of the vast tracts of data readily available. The amount of information is simply too complex and too expensive to harvest on any scale.  

While click-through, open and bounce rates all have their merits, Paul Mottram at Bite Communications PR maintains that as yet, there is no standardised currency with which PR firms and, more importantly, their clients, can gauge how well their social media initiatives are translating with potential customers.

The June, 2010 Barcelona Declaration of measurement principles, spearheaded by the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications, is gradually being taken up by the industry – but it’s not yet been unanimously embraced. More locally, the International Conference on Online Media Measurement (I-COM) established an Asia-Pacific regional hub in July this year with industry veteran Shashank Tripathi as its vice-chairman and a commitment to making progress on the issue. “We need to help [the region’s] disparate markets realise that there are more similarities than differences, and that similarities can be used to create common ground around online measurement standards,” Tripathi said.

But for all the industry talk of standardisation – on which Mottram claims “we’re closer than ever before” – progress remains slow. Many PR clients still tend to focus on unique visits, Facebook ‘likes’ and other quantitative measurements or ‘outputs’, rather than really engaging with the meat of social media campaigns – ‘outcomes’. Keeping tabs on Facebook ‘fans’ and YouTube channel subscribers – numbers that only ever grow – might serve to bolster internal marketing egos but does little to help grow the actual brand. More online transactions, better client relationship management and higher sales carry more weight for digitally-sceptical executives than do dozens of pixellated 'thumbs-up'.
    
So how can brands that are keen to leverage the marketing potential of online platforms ensure that their status updates, custom-designed applications and exclusive competitions are not all for naught? The credo of social media success is simple, says Manish Sinha, Chief strategy officer of Digitas India: "Listen more, talk less". A host of firms are now offering social media monitoring services, making sense of much of the chaos that is online feedback.

Bite’s Mottram highlights a distinction between marketing and communications to offer his suggestion to digital branders.  “Earned media is about engagement, rather than transactions. Focus on engagement before transactions, whether clicks, fans or likes.” It’s this softly-softly approach to social media marketing that, says Mottram, will distinguish successful campaigns from aggressive flops. “Most people, most of the time, simply don’t like being sold to," he warns.