Here’s yet another agency white paper on social marketing … this one, from Serengeti Communications, addresses the challenge of measuring social media impact.
Everyone from marketing veteran Seth Godin (see his recent Clout post) to the newest hire on your web team (just walk down the hall), probably egged on by Godin, wants your nonprofit to wade into social media … "Get out there on the cutting edge, you loser!
That’s cool. But your boss probably wants to see some evidence of real impact (especially if you are a fundraiser). Serengeti’s paper takes a stab at the pertinent metrics. And one of their key points is that you might in fact have more relevant data than you think … you just have to collect and integrate it, and relate it to concrete marketing objectives.
Serengeti’s list of metrics and data sources range from the obvious (e.g., campaign-specific traffic, video views, info requests, friend/fans, referrals, etc) to newer measures like buzz monitoring and amount of user-generated content.
Of course, if you’re a fundraiser, none of these "process" measures are a substitute for: a) actual giving attributable to donors engaged by social net presence/projects; and, b) some measure of the missionary value of those donors who use social media. Keep in mind that, to be usefully compared to other fundraising media and approaches, the dollars (direct and indirect) generated by social media must be evaluated against some cost to get a ROI … no marketing is free. None.
In any event, Serengeti’s paper will help you get your arms around the social media impact measurement challenge.
Tom
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In the case of Twitter, I think it is a great tool for monitoring what donors may be saying about your organization and responding to their concerns. However, most people on Twitter are following hundreds of people/organizations. So, I have a hard time seeing how one organization’s tweet will standout from the crowd. I know from my own personal experience of following 60 people that I can only read a very small percentage of any day’s tweets.
Thanks for sharing the white paper with your community! You raise a couple of interesting topics. In terms of tracking the actual value of customers/constituents who are engaged in social media, it is possible to go some ways towards this. Some of the simple mechanisms being used by companies like House Party to identify the SM habits of participants who end up in the crm database can provide quite sophisticated points of analysis. Influencer analysis techniques are also getting better, which makes tracking that “missionary” effect more feasible, at least to some extent. Is it perfect? No, but no measurement ever is.
We are a long way from out of the box, cookie cutter solutions for SM measurement, but we’re very encouraged by what is possible. As I noted in the paper, our experience has been that most clients are very pleasantly surprised with what can be done using what they already have. It’s all about the combos.