Once again, ‘tis the season for predictions. My list of 10 predictions for 2012 follows, but before that I’d like to briefly explain how I arrived at the predictions below.
Background
2008 and 2009 were the first two years that saw business really began to take social media seriously, so the theme for that time really was just “what should I be doing and how should I do it?”
These were the years in which social media strategies began to emerge, and businesses began to build out their presence on the major social networks.
In 2009 and 2010, companies who had invested in getting their social media approaches up and running began to look for ways to develop focus and evaluate results. The listening platform industry, led by Radian6, grew rapidly to meet this need. During this time, social media measurement became all about volumes of conversation, sentiment of conversation, key topics of conversation and as the holy grail, influencer identification.
2010 saw the more widespread adoption of Facebook insights, and the corresponding emergence of the “direction, volumes and mash-up metrics” (such as Klout) school of measurement to supplement the limitations of listening platforms’ ability to also evaluate quality and impact of engagement across major social networks.
Even with reporting on volumes and tone of conversation, growth in likes, views, followers, retweets and the like, and changes in company Klout score or another such “proprietary” metrics, as we entered 2011, company management was still asking its digital teams what social media was really doing for the business. Thus 2011 became the year of “social media ROI”.
I’ll let a prior post on this topic speak for itself. Suffice it to say that this focus on ROI, though a logical culmination of several years of management questions around the value of social media, misses some of the most valuable aspects of social media.
Limited Focus
Because many digital teams that now work in social media have traditionally had the ability to measure their work in terms of direct referrals by running segmented analysis on unique visitors’ paths to online conversion, these teams may over-rely on direct attribution or referral to some conversion outcome (leads or sales) as the best method for measuring their work in social media.
While I certainly appreciate and support the commitment to measurement shown by these teams, I am afraid that this approach can nevertheless devalue very important factors in driving market share, purchase consideration, retention and loyalty. When the measurement of value is just about direct contribution to sales (as it is in most ROI models), the value of contributing to factors such as awareness, affinity, trust, satisfaction and endorsement can get lost.
Predictions
Specifically because social media - along with much of the mobile experience and the customer servicing side of websites - is all about affinity, trust, satisfaction and endorsement, I predict that in 2012:
1. Reality will bite back on 2011’s heavy focus on social media measurement that focuses almost exclusively on ROI.
2. In the coming year, smart companies will stop wondering if social & mobile have value, and will simply accept that these are now fundamental channels in the marketing mix.
3. Smart companies will understand that of course social and mobile can contribute to their marketing efforts, and probably in ways that can’t always be measured in direct financial contribution.
4. To find these points of value-adding engagement, measurement of social and mobile will begin to evolve to focus on finding and valuing the supporting contributions of social media to brand affinity and purchase decisions.
5. As such, social and mobile engagement will need to be considered with all other marketing channels in marketing mix modeling and evaluation, and these models will need to be refined to consider a ratio of impact to investment that differs from traditional channels.
6. To maximize this impact, measurement and techniques for real-time optimization of social media engagement will begin to be developed and utilized by leading firms.
7. For this to happen, smart businesses will begin to sit down and think realistically about what expectations they can have around social media.
8. As a result of these conversations, expectations around direct sales contributions will begin to recede (though not disappear), while more realistic expectations around awareness, endorsement, etc., take their place.
9. The lines between social, mobile and traditional web-based digital will begin to blur, as will operational silos around these. Social and mobile strategies will also continue to merge with television and print advertising.
10. Really smart companies, especially those with a strong capability or opportunity in providing ongoing value to customers digitally, will begin to see their end-to-end marketing mix as an integrated channel for inviting customers to engage in voluntary experience collaboration. They will need to organize themselves in order to really walk the walk.
