Social Media Is About More Than Social Media by David Edelman

One of the questions that often comes up when I’m speaking with clients about social media data is, “How do I know if my social media is working?” It’s a good question, but it’s misleading because it frames the question just around social media. The fact is social works with other channels, and you can’t tell if it’s working on its own unless you understand how it’s working with other channels.

For example, when you’re doing certain kinds structured marketing activities, such as an ad campaign, you want to correlate that with the type and nature of buzz that’s coming out about it.You might also want to track certain things farther afield, like the correlation of buzz with certain attributes in the environment such as weather patterns, changes in the economy, or broader news events.

One of the things we’ve seen is new kinds of modeling where you can actually take the unstructured nature of social media and sentiment, for example, positive versus negative, and actually be able to take all of that and bring that into a model where you can compare the GRPs (Gross Ratings Points) across different media to actually see the effect that unstructured activity of social media is happening relative to all the other structured channels on your sales (my colleagues published a great piece on this: (Getting Beyond the Buzz: Is your Social Media Working?)

What makes this so interesting is that you can actually start to create some much more dynamic ways of looking overall at your marketing strategy by seeing how it’s performing across all these various channels. That sort of insight is a big help to marketers in terms of where they spend their marketing dollars, and how those dollars are performing.

What metrics are most important for you?

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