Knowledgeistics

Mashable has a post up discussing Ford’s dominance in the social media space vis-à-vis competitors. The point is that Ford has been massively more successful in creating a social media presence, as measured by:

• Blog mentions
• Videos tagged on YouTube
•  Photos on Flickr

The author is not the only social media expert to use these metrics like these. It’s an understandable temptation – followers, re-tweets, and tags are easy ways to measure progress. However, there isn’t a discussion of why these metrics are valuable to Ford. It’s not clear, after all, that a twitter follower is in any way more likely to buy a new Ford – particularly since a large percentage of these followers are themselves social media experts.

Here are the three most important metrics for social media. If you can’t measure these, and don’t have a line of sight to measuring these, your initiative is in trouble:

1. What did you learn? Understanding your customer or community better is a fantastic goal and one that we fully support. The functionality of social media market research has high value potential, and should be considered a positive ROI investment in the way that focus groups or surveys are generally valued.
2. Who did we reach? If your B2B company has run a successful campaign and generated multiple sales leads, congratulations — you’ve run a successful social media campaign. However, if you have no idea how reaching more targets impacts your top line, it might be time to rethink your strategy. And if you’re having a hard time knowing if you’re reaching customers or just other marketers it is definitely time to rethink the strategy. 
3. What was the ROI? If you are able to measure a direct top-line result of your campaign you’ve solved the paradox of social media marketing. You did it!

As with any initiative, understanding the rules for success is critical. Make sure you agree to them upfront with your social media consultant.

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