Social Commerce

Prepping for the upcoming AMA presentation in Atlanta (http://www.marketingpower.com/Calendar/Documents/2010/spotlights/SocialMediaMonitoring_ROI.pdf) where I will be presenting with friend and colleague Amanda Devito about ROI of social media (because I wanted to be unique and different… oh wait!).

Measuring Social Media ROI

Social Media can be an extension of direct marketing.  When delivering messages in the social space (planting the seeds) focus on crafting call-to-actions that drive engagement (clicks).   Beyond delivering a deeper brand experience, getting the click is critical for tracking.  Once someone has clicked it enables you to track their digital footprint with your brand.  As you deepen the profile over time you can extend the hooks needed to do direct revenue attribution.

On an indirect basis, Social Media can also be a useful tool for generating consumer insights, evaluating media / campaign performance, and a slew of other benefits.  While certainly there is value created for the business here, calculating ROI can be an act of voodoo as you are always striving to correlate two basically unrelated flows.  With that said, you can get to some generally acceptable ROI conclusions by looking at overall brand valuation models.  There are a host of different methodologies out there including license-based (royalty-relief), market value, economic use, cost (a bit dodgy), etc.  A common factor across all of these is relative competitive positioning as part of forecasted cash flows or the all important beta.  A well crafted SMM search can yield underlying data points to include in this type of analysis.

For a quick summary you checkout:

http://www.intangiblebusiness.com/Brand-Services/Marketing-services/News/Brand-valuation-why-amp-how~467.html

Socialnomics ROI

This one may not be quite on the same level as Eric’s first piece, but again great production quality and some really great referencable facts.