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Your boss sends you an email. They are going over budgets, and the recent economic downturn means that management is going to be inspecting the quality of your social media campaigns with a fine tooth comb. Are you ready to prove emerging media technology really does impact the bottom line? If you’re using social media to boost organizational effectiveness, what have these digital communities done for the company?
All hard questions, and unfortunately, there is no set answer. Share with me some of the difficulties you have with proving ROI, whether it’s social media or something completely unrelated to the topic or even marketing communications.
Proving the return on investment of integrated marketing communications programs has always been a challenge simply because the success of many of our campaigns are behavioral and as a result, may take a longer time to prove its worth. This is also assuming that you have a solid baseline to go off on and have been tracking quantitative and qualitative progression every step of the way.
Here are some ways you can prove your emerging media marketing technology is or is not working:
1. Create a presentation that clearly defines the goals and objectives of your emerging media campaign.
2. Be sure to scope out exactly what your campaign is proposing to accomplish and what it is not
3. Present the following data with a story on what each criteria means for the overall brand equity of the organization:
a. Activity and Traffic including click-through (See the videos below for some
free reporting tools you could utilize)
b. Duration (WebTrends and Omniture are just two out of a long list of
companies that can allow you to see where they are clicking and for how
long. You Tube also now has their own analytic platform)
c. Engagement (Are your readers participating? What are they writing
about? How often? AideRSS even ranks your engagement level every week)
d. Voice of Customer (What types of feedback are you getting from your
customers? Is your company headed in the right direction? What is the tone
of most user-generated content? Has that improved over time?)
AideRSS
Google Analytics
Feedburner
