The big question all marketers are asking: “How DO I Measure Social Media?”

There have been many, many discussions around social media measurement especially over the last year. For some reason, nailing down the best way to measure has evaded us all. Most of the challenge is a result of having metrics that can be compared from one company to the next.

Without that, it is hard to say if what you are doing is good, bad, or ugly. This is exacerbated with a certain level of fear of measuring social because it can be difficult to correlate something like Twitter followers to new business.

This is certainly an understandable fear. Just remember that social media is just a tool in your marketing tool kit. If you measure social media using some of the same measurements you’ve always used, it will start to make sense and be easier to justify your efforts.

There are 5 categories in the social media funnel.

Exposure

This is just like the exposure you’ve been measuring for years. Essentially, you are choosing metrics which measure your reach. How many people are listening to you or talking about your brand? To actually measure this it is a combination of your normal web analytics, your Twitter followers, your Facebook fans, and running a search for your brand mentions. I use Radian 6 for this, but you could also do a Google search and look at growth in the number of returned results but this isn’t as accurate.

Influence

This is prefaced by saying that this category of measurement is a little harder if you don’t have Radian 6. By measuring the number of mentions for industry key words against the number of times your brand is mentioned with those key words you can get a measurement of your share of voice in the industry. You can also get a report on the top influencers from your industry. Finally, sentiment, while still imprecise, gives you a general measurement of whether people say you suck or you rock.

Engagement

This is fairly easily measured by tracking the number of clicks you get on the links you post, the number of times your messages are shared or retweeted, how many direct messages you get, and how many comments you receive.

Action/Convert

Is any of this contributing to the pipeline? Measure the pieces of content that tie to your sales process whether it be a white paper, webinar, lead generation form, pitch or proposal.

Sales

Oh, the elusive white horse. How much money are these efforts generating? If you’ve measured this far, you can measure what translate into dough.

Retain

The step many forget. Don’t forget to follow these customers and look at their repeat business and retention rates.

Remember, social media is like the almighty assist. It can help add more opportunities to convert business, but at the end of the day it is just putting leads in the funnel. Your normal sales process is responsible for converting those leads.

This post was written as a guest post for FolkMedia.org

Restaurant Patrons Go Digital

Many small businesses are wondering how they can participate in social media to help grow their business. The one industry that can easily jump into the mix is the restaurant industry. Many small businesses are grappling with the challenge of not having enough staff to manage social media. Restaurants have a great advantage here, they can let their patrons do the work. With so many web-enabled phones on the market restaurants can take advantage of buzz that is created by their patrons in a few simple steps. Here are 3 simple tips for restaurants to capitalize on social media.

1) Reward your patrons for online reviews

Promote discounts to patrons who post reviews of your establishment while dining. From Zagat to Urban Spoon there are many review sites that consumers look at before deciding where to go for their next meal or happy hour. Offer a reasonable discount if  patron can show you their review before they close out their tab. This allows you to immediately know whether or not they are satisfied, and if they weren’t you still have a chance to make the customer happy before they leave your restaurant. An opportunity that is priceless if you want them to return again. Further, you will increase the number of reviews of your restaurant on these highly trafficked sites making it a great opportunity to generate more future business.

Tip: Be prepared with how you will handle negative feedback. Sometimes it is difficult to hear, but it is the only way you will know how people really feel so that you can fix it.

2) Offer Tweet Up specials

A Tweet Up is when a group of local Twitter users decides to get together and meet in person for a few drinks. Many times these social media junkies will tweet about their experience and upload photos of themselves and others at the event. Because they surely mention where the event is being held, this is great publicity for you. You probably already have a list of happy hour specials that you regularly cycle through take it a step further by offering a Tweet Up special. The key is to make sure that your Tweet Up special is exclusive to those who are actually attending the Tweet Up and not anyone there for happy hour.

Tip: Those who are actually attending will be more than willing to show you a tweet they have sent about the event as proof for a good deal, if so desired.

3) Create a FREE check-in shot

Have you heard of FourSquare or GoWalla? Well your patrons might have and there is a little competition happening to check in at businesses you frequent so that you can get points, badges, and rewards. After you check in patrons can add tips for others who check in after they do. The reason this is great for the restaurant is that when someone checks in they can share their location on Twitter and FaceBook letting all of their friends know where they are. Personally, I’m a FourSquare fan and within our group there is a friendly competition to become Mayor at our local hot spots something that can only be achieved by checking in more than anyone else.   What does that mean for the business owner? A competition for repeat business…Sweet.

Tip: Create a shot that you give to people who can show their check in for free. You could call it the GoSquare, the FourWalla, or some other creative name you come up with.

If you really want to join in on the fun create a Twitter account and FaceBook fan page for the restaurant. Post your specials and events for the day and upload photos of all the fun people are having. There is no better way to become the local hot spot than to give patrons lots of ways to tell their friends how awesome you are.

Measure the Marketing Mix

I’ve seen a lot of buzz about marketing operations, marketing measurement and marketing ROI on blogs and Twitter lately. There are certainly very good reasons for organizations to put resources behind taking a hard look at the contributions of all of their departments including marketing. The buzz swings all the way to the left with people
claiming you can’t measure marketing and back out to the right with here’s how you measure it. What I’ve noticed is even those who claim to be able to measure, haven’t really detailed how. As we are building marketing plans and marketing strategy we must start to include measures of success that we can deliver on.

In organizations, the pressure can bring “old school” and “new school” marketing to a clearly drawn battle line. Many times I’ve heard the claim: you can’t measure __________ (fill in the blank) marketing, brand awareness, social media or anything else requested. I often wonder, do people really believe this? Or are these people just scared to be measured? This type of clear-cut measurement certainly puts a new perspective on whether or not you are a “good” marketer. It could equally be a result of people truly not knowing “how” to measure results effectively. It doesn’t help when there are a lot of theories about measurement and few true industry standards beyond “yeah we measure ROI.” Really?!? Who does it, how do they do it, when do they do it, what do you do as a result of it, and the big question…how long does it take them to pull the report together?

Many marketers are pushing the envelope at organizations and looking for ways to measure everything. The problem we are all finding is that we can measure almost everything and it’s easy to get caught with paralysis by analysis. What should you measure? How often? And what metrics really matter?

I recently read an excellent blog post called “Mapping the Marcom Mix to the Lead Funnel”. I was impressed with the thought process behind this as I have been doing a lot of work on integrating funnel management and marketing strategies for marketing and sales. This spawned what I like to call, a moment of brilliance! I admit they are sometimes fleeting, but occasionally things just align themselves in a way that provide previously unseen clarity. When I started to consider how all the activities map to the funnel, I immediately wanted to measure their impact.

So, I worked on creating a model to measure the Return on Marketing Investment. There were three core considerations to building a model that I believe would actually work.

Measure the impact of the entire marketing mix

Like many marketers I’ve tried to measure the success of individual projects and campaigns with varying levels of results. The challenge was measuring long-term, mid-term and short-term strategies and relating them to ROI.  Because, ROI is return on investment which naturally requires you to track directly to revenue mid-term and long-term strategies end up with a result that looks like it was a failure. With  strategies like Brand Awareness it is much harder to tie them to current revenue as the impact of your activities today may not pay off for several years,  yet we struggle because we are being held accountable for these activities today. Trying to measure each item individually can lead to poor decisions based on short-term results. What really matters is how is the entire marketing mix contributing to overall lead generation.  I believe the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts in marketing.

Make sure your measures are actionable

I think it is mission critical that the data you surround yourself with represents items that you can clearly use to make better decisions. A bunch of foo foo numbers that aren’t clearly aligned with the input and the output just increase the confusion. Use measures that matter and can be used as a diagnostic tool and a success measurement tool and you’ve hit the sweet spot!

To be effective your marketing dashboard should:

1. Enable you to identify failures
2. Enable you to identify successes
3. Enable you to see where those failures and successes lie within your mix and/or tell you where to dig deeper to figure it out

Don’t stop at the marketing team

In my previous experience, every position I’ve held had one purpose. To use marketing to generate more revenue and more profit for the organization. All of the best marketing in the world will fall flat if your sales team is not equipped to close the deal. Therefore, it is critical that you measure all the way through the sales organization. This is certainly not so you can point fingers at the sales team, rather it is an opportunity for more open discussions about the impact marketing is having on the organization and how sales is delivering on that impact. Never forget, we’re all in this together.

So what does this look like? As a visual person, I use graphics to help tell the story and here is what it looks like to me. Now to tie it all together, how does this deliver on the three considerations?

Measure the Marketing Mix

Measure the impact of the entire marketing mix

As you can see at the top of the funnel you are keeping track of all of the leads delivered from each type of source. I chose to do this independently by source. However, ROI is not calculated on one item, it is calculated based on all of the inputs and the resulting outputs. I went one step further, and decided to measure based on the time frame (short, medium, fast) to an anticipated purchase and the expenses for the lead nurturing that is being done for each of those groups. Certainly for you the break-down may be different. I’m a big fan of the old KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) philosophy so I go with the core things that matter to both marketing and sales and that is their possibility of conversion or how “warm” are they.

Make sure your measures are actionable

The proof really is in the pudding here. By looking at this graph regularly I can identify several critical things in order to gauge success over time. First, are leads piling up in one of the tracks? If so, we aren’t moving them along effectively and need to take a look at our lead nurturing and/or sales activities in that group. Second, are there enough leads coming into the funnel to deliver the revenue we’ve forecasted for the period. Over time, you will get a better perspective of conversion rates and how many leads you need to generate a certain level of sales. This certainly helps when you need to ask for more budget $$$ to fill the pipeline. Third, from a budget perspective you can see where you spend your budget and whether or not it is delivering the leads you expected. Once you identify where the problems are you can do more investigation into that particular area simply by digging into the raw data behind the item with a simple click  instead of searching for the needle in the haystack.

Don’t stop at the marketing team

As you can see, leads are tracked all the way to revenue.  By measuring all the way through you can clearly see whether or not your marketing activities are having an impact on sales. If not, you have some work to do. If they do, how can you make it better? Or you may find that some of the activities you are spending a lot of money on are preventing you from being able to spend where you are generating the biggest results.

So go big, be bold. Measure it and see how your team stacks up. If you don’t like what you see, fix it. If you do, congratulations! Fuel an environment where old and new school thrive.