Lots of talks, reading, and researches this last months. The big result of all this is about understanding that social media strategies are set up to create value not only to move people from one environment to another (ie. ecosystem to site). There not only quantitative data, its more than a reach.

We’re looking at measuring a social media effect in 2 dimensions:
- the effect on your brand presence online (building and ecosystem where your values are understood, adopted and shared)
- the effect on your business (how do you make $$?)

So what worth it? Traditional KPIs represent the value of an activity – an accumulation of visitors’ actions, but the emotional effect of the interaction represents the quality of it – also named the worth of the activity by Jenkins.

Worth confirms whether or not the visitor has adopted your idea (message, tool, content), and to which effect the idea has spread among peers. This happens outside of your website,  it’s an overall online presence that is represented. In the context of social media, worth represents the transformation of the idea you spread into something meaningful for your business.

This is not about a general formula, this is about understanding what brings value to your brand, business, product. I truly believe (thanks Thane!) that the magic comes from identifying the true problem you need to fix, not from gathering the more data you can. If we come back to a one thing you need to fix, set up a strategy, implement, measure, tweak, cut and evolve… that becomes more tangible for monitoring a conversation, and its impact on a business.

Interesting presentation on that topic:
http://www.slideshare.net/thebrandbuilder/olivier-blanchard-basics-of-social-media-roi  by Olivier Blanchard @thebrandbuilder

http://www.randomactsofdata.com/?p=73

Razorfish  Social Influence Marketing thanks to Shiv Singh. @shivsingh

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Is this a fad? a buzz word? Whatever happens right now, it’s a fact that  communication strategies are evolving rapidly and consumers are leading that game. You’re probably asked to consider doing a thing on Facebook and another cool Twitter or blog.

Well… as any other communication-marketing campaign you will need clear objectives and a clear strategic vision. I mean… on a long term, because social media “things” don’t happen overnight. They’re long term conversations, engagement, movements around your brand. Not “campaigns” per say.

Another reality we’re all facing is how do we finance these things? I believe this should be financed from the  media buy envelop. However, this could be discussed as it also relates to PR and brand awareness. But should this come from the web department? When actually it doesn’t directly rely to the website but more from the “online presence”… in other words, the brand communication strategy outside of the website (what we call the “ecosystem”).

That article about how Unilever considers doing social media is interesting as they consider it  playing “a role underneath everything we’re doing.” They work from the notion of an “earned” media on top of everything else you do. But still classified as a media.

If you start by having clear objectives, a good next step would be to set up KPIs and the tools needed to track and monitor results, this will help you figure out how you could finance it. But whatever happens, it’s not a one-shot investment, it’s to be considered as a monthly fee, a “maintenance” fee that can include: community management, original content creation, monitoring and reporting. Without monitoring and content creation it might be very complicated to attribute a tangible value and ROI to it.

My two cents :)

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