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Measuring Social Media Campaigns: It Don't Mean a Thing, if it Ain't got Ker-Ching
Posted by Tom Gerace on July 28, 2009 at 05:46 PM PDT
Over the past 24 months, social media has moved from the test column into the core investment column of many marketing budgets. Those that were experimenting a year ago with $50,000 campaigns are now investing in work many times that size. Communications teams are shifting focus to social tools where they can interact directly with customers and companies are adding VP and director-level roles focused exclusively on social media.
Much of this investment is based on the gut of good marketers rather than on hard performance data. Measurement in social media has lagged consumer engagement. That is about to change.
Companies are now requesting and social media companies are delivering control-group studies to evaluate the impact of social media campaigns. They want to understand precisely how these campaigns make the cash register ring. Consider this example of a campaign we just completed on Gather.
Client Goals:
The campaign objective was to build awareness, purchase intent and trial of a new mass market consumer packaged goods product.
Measurement Methodology:
- Reach: measured by the unique users exposed to some aspect of the campaign. Individual activities like reviewing and commenting were broken-out separately.
- Impact: measured based on a control group study. Responses compared those exposed to some aspect of the campaign with those not exposed on the same site. Similar studies were completed on traditional media sites running media campaigns as well for cross site comparison.
- Studies were completed by third party surveying groups and analyzed by the media buying agency. We also operated our own internal study to calibrate results of our internal tools against those of our partners.
Engagement Methodology:Gather engineered conversation about the product through product sampling and reviews by approximately 100 members. Because members are connected to friends on the site, their conversation was seen hundreds of thousands of times by others on the site in their content and conversation feeds.
- Sampling by Influencers: Gather identified 25 influential Gather women to try the product in place of substitute goods. Members were identified based on algorithmic analysis of their standing within the community. These members then came back to the site to write about their week long trial and discussed the experience with other members.
- By Request: Gather distributed additional product samples to Gather members to try when they needed a break during their busy days. Members requested product samples by discussing their busy days and why they need the break.
- Take-a-Break Chats: Gather created a series of weekly online chats for women to discuss their busy lives, tips for relaxation and their short-term and long-term goals. Chats were held in the afternoon when people tend to need a break. Product samples were given out during the chats.
- To-Do Surveys: Gather posted regular surveys throughout the program to engage members in discussions and to produce member-generated content for the group. Members filled out surveys discussing their long- and short-term goals, they submitted to-do lists and playlists, and they shared motivational tips with each other.
- Member Submissions: Members were allowed to submit their own content and start their own discussions in the group as well, and the community was moderated to ensure that all content aligned with the theme and focus of the community.
Ker-ching…er…I mean “Results”I’ll admit, we were nervous about what the numbers might say. We had observational and anecdotal information about the power of product sampling on the site. We had seen members truly engage in conversation around a product. But we had not measured the mass-market impact of these conversations. We didn’t know if they moved the needle for the friends and friends-of-friends that were discussing products they had tried. Then the cash register rang.
Gather’s social media campaign showed a 30% increase in purchase intent by those exposed to the campaign. According to the measurement data collected by both Gather and the media buying organization, the social media campaign operated on Gather outperformed other sites involved in the campaign. It significantly exceeded results seen in these types of studies on traditional media sites. People who were exposed to the program on Gather performed 15-20% higher across every campaign metric than the control group.
Of course, this is just a single test with good results. But it suggests the potential of engagement marketing for building purchase intent for consumer packaged goods makers. Over time, we will need a series of campaigns that demonstrate similar progress to prove the medium. As marketers increasingly require improved measurement and we in the industry come together to standardize the methods by which we measure, I suspect social media campaigns, done right, will continue to demonstrate good results.
As we move into this brave new world, let me close with a couple of questions: How do you measure the campaigns you run? What metrics do you find most credible?
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