Matthew Burgess

You can read Part 1 of this series here: “Things I find hard about Social Media #1“. Now, I present you with “Things I find hard about Social Media #2″

****

Demonstrating ROI on Social Media. ‘Nuff Said.

.

.

.

.

.

Ok, ok, maybe a bit more needs to be said. Now see, here’s the thing. I’ve definitely been doing a fair amount of reading on “ROI and Social Media”, so I’m not one of those guys who complains about the rainy clouds before even looking outside at the weather. I know that there’s a lot of unfair discussion about Social Media ROI from those who just assume it’s impossible to measure, when it clearly is possible. I mean, just read KD Paine’s blog, or Jeremiah Owyang’s and you can see that some brands are not only measuring Social Media ROI, but kicking ass and taking names at it.

Tracking social mentions isn’t hard. Time consuming, yes (if you can’t afford to pony up for services such as Radian6, anyway), but hard, no. There are numerous technologies available for tracking mentions, most of which are ably summed up by Jye Smith over at his blog, so I won’t bother to rehash that here.

Apart from that, there are no end of people displaying test cases for Social Media ROI… not least of which is Chris Brogan with his “success stories” in his Delicious tags.

My problem comes in that most of these cases are written from the point of view of people who create content on their own sites. So often they can use simple metrics as page views, RSS subscribers, unique visitors, returning traffic, etc etc. But what about those sites that don’t have that business model? That simply want their site to remain a “no nonsense, in and out, complete the transaction” site? (whatever that transaction may be). In other words, I’m talking about the brands who DO want to engage with their customers… but because excessive engagement on their own site might be against the “business model” (and I know most of you smartasses are going to say “change the business model then”), they are forced to use outside properties for that engagement.

So we’re talking forum discussions, twitter, Facebook pages etc. You know the type.

Now, my main bug bear here is measuring interaction with (for example) Twitter users. Obviously there are certain things you can measure, such as customer service tickets handled through twitter, collaborative innovations initiated through open conversations on twitter and the like… but up until now, I’m still struggling to find a sure-fire way of tracking commerce initiated through twitter.

Now, before any of you say, “But bit.ly and cli.gs and the like all give you stats for your Twitter links! If you put a link out on Twitter to your site, you can track how many people clicked on it. Hell, you can even track WHERE those clicks came from!”… yes, I’m aware of that. I heart cli.gs in a way that a man should never love a free online service.

BUT, while bit.ly and the like can do a great job telling you how many people clicked on your link, that’s pretty much where the helpfulness ends… after all, they can’t track what those people did once they landed on your site… they can’t track the path of their visit, so to speak.

And people are now going to say, “Yes, but that’s where analytics like Google Analytics & Omniture etc are your friend. Use those, and you’ll be able to track all you like”. Well, not really. Usually, yes, but if a visitor clicks on a bit.ly link in a third party client, such as Tweetdeck etc (which I think most Twitter users would be using, as opposed to the web), then those clicks are attributed to your “Direct” traffic, which means you can’t measure your income generated by your Twitter traffic.

Here’s the thing: For links that you yourself put out, there’s a way around this… use your own tracking codes. There’s a great article on this over at the More Visibility blog.

That takes care of that. But how do you track links from other people? That’s the bit that gets me. I mean, let’s say as part of your “Social Media Campaign”, you’re going out there and getting people talking about you. You’re entering into conversations, you’re finding out what customers are looking for, you’re listening and you’re acting to make yourself better. And then, because of that, your brand starts going wild on Twitter (side note: excuse the constant use of Twitter here, it’s just the easiest example given the current climate).
So you’ve done a great job, as I say your brand’s going wild on Twitter, for some reason people are sharing links to your site left right and centre, people are clicking on those links and gosh darn it, they’re transacting on your site. Who’da thunk it, right?

Well, actually, I would have. Or, in keeping with the narrative, you did. You went out there, you saw the benefits to actually listening to your customers (imagine that, right?), and as a direct result of all the goodness that you’ve done out there, you sales are going gangbusters. You should be on top of the world.

BUT, those links that people are sharing out there? They won’t have those tracking codes we discussed a few paragraphs earlier. Those were honest to goodness natural links that they just shared themselves. And because there’s no tracking code on the link, every. single. one. of those sales that should be attributed to the social media campaign is tracked as a “Direct” visit, and not notched up to your work.

Every. Single. One.

Now, as I say, I’ve been doing a lot of reading, but for the life of me, I just haven’t come across an answer to this yet. And, again, while I used Twitter in this case, there are many other “channels” out there where the same problem in principle applies. And it’s one of the most frustrating things to me about justifying social media to businesses. If you can’t put a dollar value to it, no matter how wrong it is, it’s often dismissed. If you’re limited to participating in conversations on properties that you struggle to track properly, how can you really measure a ROI to take to the boss and say, “Hey, you know what? We did good“.

Anyone out there able to educate me?