How to Measure Social Media

By Dereck Lackey

Prashant Suryakumar stated on Mashable on January 12, 2011.

”Social media has come of age. Marketers now have the ability to augment their traditional marketing approaches with rich behavioral and activity-based targeting that should increase marketing ROI significantly.”

A well written blog on the current state of social media analytics is both interesting and at times,  a narrow point of view. Or perhaps too broad a point of view. For example he says “There are no “best practices” for measuring a successful social media campaign.” Depending on his context, we were surprised to hear him say that. We have been doing exactly that for 15 months now with our Drum Platform. It integrates direct response promotion (direct mail, email marketing, etc) with social media sharing. It has been producing exceptional results, producing double digit response rates while building net new opt-ins (from the social sharing). And it allows us to measure the ROI of every campaign. 

 The concept is to take a direct mail campaign that you believe should provide a 1.5% response rate. Rather than simply giving your prospect a savings coupon, have them click to activate the offer.

The click is on a Personal URL that takes them to an opt-in page where they must click to confirm the pre-populated data is correct and they accept the terms and conditions to opt-in to your email list (making it far more cost effective to continue your dialogue via future emails instead of direct mail) and hit the continue button.

 The next screen presents an incentive to share this offer with your friends and family. The offer involves ballots in a grand prize offering if they share using our one-click Facebook, Twitter or any other of the 287 social media sites you choose. A percentage of the initial response share, causing an exponential result via several generations of sharing. Once they share, we allow them to print, download or email their personalized coupon.

All this to say, the PURL allows us to track every detail. New people arriving from the social lift encounter a blank screen that requests first name, last name, email address as well as birthdate and gender so we can identify them. A PURL is automatically created in our platform so we know who influenced you and who you influenced. We can measure every element that is important to our client, including your social influence within a specific environment.

Now, if Prashant Suryakumar was referring to a campaign the way we do, I invite him to check us out. If on the other hand he is using the broad sense of the word campaign, meaning tracking Corporate Tweets and their affect or company Facebook postings and their tangible results, well that’s a different story. What I am pretty sure of though is that someone, somewhere is at work on that. What we are calling social media is only the beginning – the tip of the iceberg. You see the social interaction on the surface, but the data below is massive. And incredibly valauable to those marketers who are listening.