Everyone is grappling with how to measure social media efforts. Amazingly it sounds very familiar. The same lame arguments were made about PR for decades. Yes PR works, but it took an enormous amount of time and money to make it work. Today the rush to Social Media is being justified in the same mushy way. Take E
-Content’s Jan/Feb 2010 article:
Does Social Work? Measuring Community Effectiveness. it goes on an on, willy nilly through a dozen different scenarios: measure how often people post, watch what people post…a dizzying list that was only meaningful to each specific scenario. The article finally concluded that you have to measure what is important to you. D’oh.
But here’s the catch: ACTUALLY MEASURING. The online analytics that were made to measure web “traditional” activity (referrals, uniques etc) are pretty useless. They give you a baseline, but they don’t measure sentiment. That comes down to mushy qualitative grunt work. And there is a point where measuring that is just too costly. Tools are emerging, but OMG they are not close to prime time yet! For example, the Camarès Team had a simply miserable experience with Kontagent a product claiming to measure viral spread of Facebook efforts. Miserable! We could not get it to work to save our lives and when pinging tech support we were told: “We only help paying customers.” That was exactly what we were attempting to become! (Having seen way too much vapor ware in my lifetime we always try before we buy.) No money lost there, just a lot of time.
The meta challenge is that Social Media remains fragmented and not yet fully understood. SEO and Paid Search and the Web in general were in a similar space in 2004. But there are a few things that the Camarès team has come to understand about what works on Social Media. And by that let me be very SPECIFIC: “works” means gets traction relatively quickly on social media platforms:
•Consumable products that are shared: specifically hard-to-find specialty foods.
•Consumable products given as gifts: Flowers, as an example, are given on holidays, birthdays and for celebrations.
•Products that are related to an already passionate OFF line market: Snowboarders, snorkelers, musicians — in this case the Passionista networks are already in place off line and the on line world simply supplies the platforms for increased communications.
•Information to already highly networked political or religious organizations: as with recreational and professional Passionistas mentioned above, these are highly engaged off line networks that are super charged by on line tools.
•Entertainment products with a good hook: for example, books, movies, music that reach into an under served markets.
There are many many products and services that will simply not get jet-fueled social media traction. The question for marketers: Does this product or service have a highly engaged off line network of passionate users? Is this product one that is shared or gifted? If not, then look long and hard at why people would even care to talk about the product. It is extremely difficult to generate passionate responses if the passion is not there to begin with. OR if the passion is highly individualized as in: in my service you are buying my unique genius, I don’t share my trade secrets. OR even if your product/service falls into the categories above you must ask, is the market large enough to support the effort?
Aside from these general broad brush strokes, there is very little more we know about how effective Social Media is – no matter what the “experts” are saying.
