Here’s the gist of the article: for two of GM’s automotive brands, GMC and Buick, consumers can now go to their website and utilize a vehicle-configuration tool, and then post the custom car from the tool to their Facebook page to solicit feedback from friends.  In addition to seeing responses from friends on Facebook, consumers also can see them in the configuration tool.  GM will be in essence spying on this activity to see what configurations are “liked” by consumers and their friends, and then “will also be able to tie those metrics to purchases.”

I’m curious HOW they plan to tie those metrics to purchases, as they then go on to say they they do NOT “have mechanisms in place to remarket to consumers who build and share a vehicle, other than messaging to those who “like” the brands’ Facebook pages.”  At least GM acknowledges that “likes” on a Facebook page or playing around with a configuration tool are not ROI:

“The ultimate gold standard is to be able to connect how people are engaging on GMC.com and with the tool and ultimately be able to lead that into sales and how this tool helps to facilitate sales at the bottom line.”

Since GM doesn’t tell us how they’re doing it, we can only speculate.  What we do know is that GM obtains permission to access consumers’ basic profile when the user connect their vehicle design with their Facebook account, and GM may use some of this information shared publicly to tailor future marketing communications.  As an exercise I want to think thorough examples of how ROI can be measured in this situation.  I will further break it down into soft ROI and hard ROI, as well as what metrics I’m certain GM can access and what is my speculation (noted by asterisk).

Soft ROI

• # of “likes” on the brand pages
• # of consumers who use the auto configuration tool on the websites
• # of consumers who share their custom car design with their Facebook friends
• # of Facebook friends who “click,” “like” and “comment” on the custom car designs
• # of Facebook friends who “pass-along” the content from one person to another*
• # of variations of car designs
• # of likes per variation (qualitative “comments”can also be coded)
• segmentation of most liked car designs based on other gathered information (e.g. male/female, age ranges, geography)
• # of configuration tool visits and duration of engagement
• source of traffic, other pages visited and in what order
• whether the brands/the promotion are being talked about online (e.g. tweets, blogs, press)
• whether the brands are being talked about more than competitive brands
• # of consumers who visit a dealer month over prior month, year over prior year
• # of consumers who use the configuration tool who own a GM car currently*
• # of consumers who submit or call for more information on their dream car*

Hard ROI aka the “Gold Standard”

• # of consumers who visit a dealer and show a copy of their dream car or mention the tool*
• # of consumers who already pretty much know what they want, due to the tool, saving agent’s time*
• # of consumers who redeem coupons/offer codes*
• # of buyers who respond in a follow-up survey that the tool had a significant bearing on their purchase*

In summary, there are certainly a lot of opportunities to measure the soft ROI of social media marketing integration and, while more challenging to link these activities to hard ROI — money earned or resources saved — it’s not impossible.  If you have any thoughts of your own to fill out these lists, I’d love to hear them!

At Digiday Social, a case study was presented by imc2 for Secret deodorant, a brand they have been working with since 2003.  The first type of cause marketing is finding something of marketing interest that resonates with the core values of the brand.  For example, Secret’s core brand value is “empowering women” so imc2 latched on to Lindsey Van’s petition to allow women to participate in ski jumping in the 2014 Olympic Winter Games (visit LetHerJump.com to sign the petition).  The commercial, which can be seen here on YouTube, resonated with the Digiday audience and received a round of applause, to which the speaker was unabashedly flattered.  Although the YouTube video has only received 1,500+ views, the company forwarded the LetHerJump domain to their Facebook page, which was smart.  The Page has nearly 40,000 Facebook Fans, which can be marketed to repeatedly (although this should be done well, which is a whole other challenge).

As a side note, another speaker at DigiDay pointed out how the advent of social sites such as Facebook has created the opportunity to constantly market to an audience, which on the plus side can increase Lifetime Customer Value (discussed in a previous post) but on the down side makes it harder to evaluate the affects of a particular marketing campaign.

In order to effectively implement the brand-alignment kind of cause marketing, several steps need to be achieved through primary research (if you need assistance, the company I work with, C.A. Walker, does this).  First, you must know what values you would like the brand to stand for, then you can use surveying to evaluate your brand’s values currently in the mind of the target markets (if any), and whether the values you would like to have associated with the brand would be acceptable in the mind of the target(s).  You can also ask what nonprofits, if any, they donate their time to so you can determine those you may want to evaluate if their brand values are in-line with yours.  From there, you need to create opportunities to attach the brand value to a particular nonprofit objective and market it.  Lastly, you should then re-test the market post-campaign to see what lift was created in terms of brand value awareness, brand loyalty, likelihood to purchase/switch from a competitor, etc.

In the instance of the Secret campaign, although I was one of the persons clapping for the video’s message at Digiday, if they were to ask me I would tell them it did not move the needle much towards me purchasing their product (this is why it’s always good to test campaigns!).  While it had some positive lift in my understanding and appreciation of the brand’s objectives,  there are other factors at play when it comes to my decision to purchase deodorant that, if I became a Facebook Fan based on this campaign, would still not be communicated.  The campaign needs to be reinforced by standard product feature marketing, including price, whether it goes on clear, effectiveness and possibly also scent.  Ways they could swing my vote are:

1. Allow me to buy a sample size before committment of the next several months of my armpits to their product, or send me a free trial in the mail or via in-store handout.
2. Package trial-sized versions of different scents together, so I could determine which of several options I prefer.

The second type of cause marketing is the more typical “sponsorship,” expected to grow 6% over the next year to $1.61 billion, according to a recent IEG Sponsorship Report.  Much marketing discussion recently has centered on the increase in “microsponsorships,” which is the giving, by a company/brand, of a few hundred or few thousand dollars to consumers to fund pet projects.  There are pluses and minuses to the trend, specifically (numbers correspond to sources at bottom):

Pluses:

• Well-conceived programs can be priceless, both in terms of the value they provide society and the business benefits they bestow on the corporations and brands that undertake them.1
• They can be a truthful, sustaining, committed approach to improving the environment and people’s lives.1
• More marketers are latching on to this, and rightfully so, because there is more transparency in where the money is going.2
• For some marketers, microsponsorships present a much-needed icebreaker in social media.2
• Sponsorships may be more market research than marketing campaign.2
• They build databases of those consumers applying for grants or voting…so marketers can reach out to them in more meaningful ways.2
• 79% of consumers say they would be likely to switch from one brand to another (when price and quality are about equal) if the other brand is associated with a good cause.2

Minuses:

• Too often we see marketers adopt causes just for the sake of having one, which often results in a mismatch between the cause’s purpose and the marketer’s [reason for being].1
• Causes appear to be a convenient charity upon which a brand can piggyback to goose its Facebook friend count or incite some quick blogger hits.1
• Just as consumers quickly saw through the rampant green-washing of the past decade, brand beware: They’ll see through your cause-washing, too.  And even if they don’t, they’ll forget about you and what your brand stands for when you move onto the next shiny marketing idea.1
• Too often companies view cause efforts as a tax they must pay.2
• Even tiny sponsorships have to be closely associated with your brand…whatever you decide to pursue can’t be an isolated campaign.  It has to tie into a bigger program that attracts people with similar values and those have got to be clearly stated.2
• Microsponsorships make it easy to “lose control of the brand,” especially when doling out small sums to far-flung strangers.2
• One downside of these programs is that they are “just pecking away” at big problems.2
• For people to be more engaged is generally a good thing, but what are the tradeoffs if people think, “I’ve voted for this; I’ve spent half an hour online looking at these projects and signing petitions, so I’ve done my civic duty.”2
• Often microsponsorships lack focus, and it’s difficult to determine ROI.  The most successful sponsorships are long-term, sustained sponsorships. Microsponsorships fly in the face of that. It’s the equivalent of unfocused granting. You want to have an impact on a cause and be given credit for that impact.2

One of the largest and well-known microsponsorship campaigns currently is Pepsi Refresh.  In order to address the issue of hard-to-define ROI, “Pepsi is employing a battery of diagnostics, including gauging of brand-equity measures that correlate with volume. The brand has also partnered with Good, Global Giving and Do Something, third parties that are on-board to ensure quality and credibility. As for getting the word out about the brand’s impact, there are plans to profile the grant winners and highlight what they’ve accomplished with the money later this year.”2

An upcoming microsponsorship campaign by Prilosec OTC is one to keep your eyes on also.  Read Prilosec Works to Become ‘Sponsor of Everything’ for more on their efforts.

1 AdAge -  Cause Campaigns Must Benefit Brand and Greater Good

2 AdAge – Cause Effect: Brands Rush to Save World One Deed at a Time

A Webinar that I sat in on last week points to some answers.  Is Your Social Media Program A Boom or A Bust? How to Use Analytics to Find Out What’s Working and What’s Not, by Meteor Solutions, put on in cooperation with Word of Mouth Marketing Association (womma.org), starts by stating that in the recent past online marketing was all about buying ads, SEO and paid search, i.e. push marketing.  What’s changed is that we’ve become more sophisticated by creating killer content, i.e. pull marketing.

In order to analyze the effects of online marketing, we typically use tracking and optimization software.  Taking a look at a few of these products,  Google Analytics provides traffic source, but it also leaves out some things that I would like to see, such as what links people are clicking on*.  For my blog I use WordPress Stats, which does show that key piece of information.  There is also StatCounter.  All are free.

*Update – there is a way to see outbound clicks afterall. You have to tag the link with a bit of JavaScript:

For example, to log every click on a particular link to www.example.com as a pageview for “/outgoing/example_com” you would add the following attribute to the link’s tag:

<a href=”http://www.example.com” onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/outgoing/example.com’);”>

Omniture offers two pay-for products, SiteCatalyst and Discover.  I am not deeply familiar with either product, but in my digging about SiteCatalyst I came across a site, Actionable-Analytics.com, which has an article that takes a look at the difference between Google Analytics and SiteCatalyst.  Taken from this article, the primary benefits of SiteCatalyst are:

• Real-time data (others are very near real-time)
• Importing external data, such as postal codes
• More custom variables
• Creating custom paths and funnels

Omniture’s Discover seems to offer some expanded features on SiteCatalyst, allowing for drilling-down to individual visitor level, comparing visitor behavior side-by-side, increased segmentation and site navigation views.

I’d also like to mention Yahoo! Web Analytics, which is free only for Yahoo! advertisers.  I don’t use this, but perhaps someone who does can share what benefits it offers that Google Analytics does not.

I came across another product, NetInsight, which is interesting. Check out this article:  12 Cool Things you can do with Unica’s Affinium NetInsight.  I could not find out how much their license fee is, but I did find this comparison of the top 10 web analytics tools if you’d like to delve into pay-for analytics packages further.

Getting back to the point of this post, Meteor Solutions goes on to say that measuring earned referrals is important, that is, when someone shares something with their friends about your company.  The top 5 sources of earned referrals are: email/IM, blogs, video, forums/message boards and aggregators/bookmarking.  Social networks comes in 6th place (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).  15-20% of unique visitors to a website are coming from earned referrals, and offer an average of 1.5-4x conversion lift.

Some tools that can be used to measure earned social media referrals:

Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, eNewsletters, et al

• Meteor Solutions – Their program uses tracking scripts to track the “pass-along” of content from one person to another via links on web pages, bookmarks, email messages, instant messenger and mobile devices.   They then provide a report on earned referrals, which can then be converted into dollars (eCPA aka effective cost per action).
• Bitly Click Trends – tells you how many clicks you have received on your bitly URL shortner, plus how many clicks for all bitly links to the long URL. For example, my blog post How to Measure Soft ROI, shared on Twitter, received 10 clicks from my bitly link bit.ly/4AsFZL, but that was then shared with others who created their own links and it was clicked 17 more times (it says, “10 out of 27″ – you have to do the math).
• As mentioned in my previous blog post, Monitoring Chatter on the Web, you can use a product like SM2 to measure whether you are receiving more mentions of brands/products/services.  They have a limited, free monitoring service and their pay-for service allows you to evaluate positive/negative sentiment of those mentions.
• *Update, from Techcrunch - Viralheat, a pay-for social product monitors YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo and other video sites, blogs, websites and Twitter by keyword.  You can filter content by location, importing analytics to Excel, and receive alerts if the “profile” (an individual’s or company’s name) you are tracking is seeing a increase in mentions or a spike in traffic.
• *Update, from Techcrunch - Startup KnowEm is helping companies manage their presence on social media.  On KnowEm’s site, brand owners can instantly check the availability of their branded usernames and keywords on more than 330 social media networks (for free). For a flat fee of $349, KnowEm will create and insert relevant information into profiles on the top 150 social media websites. For $99, KnowEm will create the profiles for the brands but won’t fill out the profiles. Brands can also pay $49 per month to protect a brand or username on emerging social media sites. So if any social media site launches, KnowEm will stake out the brand’s territory automatically.
• Wassup for WordPress – track your visitors in real time and understand what your visitors do when they surf your blog.  It has a “current visitors online” view and a “visitors details” view.
• From Bob Cortez, Tracking Online Referrals, If you have your own domain you can set up a default email address so that “anything”@yourdomain.com gets routed to you instead of bounced.  You can use that to your advantage…to track referrals for subscriptions. He says, “When I recommend that someone subscribes to [my friend John's Markethink Digest]  I tell them to mailto: bob.cortez@dakine.demon.nl?subject=Markethink.  Ask your referral partners to do the same thing.”
• From Avinesh Kaushik, Occam’s Razor:
  • Use redirects (vanity url’s) in advertising.  For example, a magazine ad with the call to action “Visit www.usequickbooks.com” redirects to www.quickbooks.intuit.com/tracking_code=newsweek_dec_2009.
  • Use unique redeemable coupons/offer codes.  For example,  ads for 1800flowers.com in a taxi cab offered the coupon code “taxi” to get $5 off a $50 order.  Another great strategy is to use the same coupon code [across] channels…so you are providing people a choice in terms of channel preference (e.g. phone vs. website) but since the code is the same you can track it.
  • Use online surveys / market research (I couldn’t agree more as the company I work with, C.A. Walker, is a full-service research firm!).  He says that even more important than website analytics, is source tracking. He goes on to say that the most important questions you can ask a customer are (I have revised these just a bit to be offline as well as online):
    1. What is the purpose of your visit today?
    2. Were you able to complete your task today? (or, Did you find what you were looking for?)
    3. If no, why not?
    4. What is the likelihood that as a result of a visit that you’ll make a purchase?
  • Correlate traffic patterns with offline ad times / patterns.  For example, what offline media stimulus – such as an infomercial – causes people to run to the Internet to search for your site?  Once you have the magazine / tv / catalog / postal mailings / radio / billboard plan for your company then do the correlations with your website traffic and see what the impact is.  I’d like to also add my own comment here – What other searches are they running beside your brand?  I know when I see something interesting on TV I always search for “product” reviews.  9 times out of 10 the results stop my interest.  Is that happening to you?

Twitter Only

• Twitturly – tracks URLs in the Twitterverse and provides a real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Each time someone tweets a URL to their followers on Twitter, Twitturly takes note of it and applies it as a vote for that URL. The more votes a URL has in the last 24 hours, the higher it ranks on Twitturly’s Top100.  My note – a good use for Twitturly is to search on a keyword to see the top shared links on that topic and connect with Twitterers in your business space.
• Klout – performs a search of Twitter to calculate your reach and to analyze who specifically you influence and who influences you.
• TweetEffect – tells you which of your Twitter updates made people follow or leave you.
• CoTweet – allows up to six Twitter accounts to respond to customer tweets through a single login.

Digg Only

• Digg Spy – lets you “spy” on what articles Digg users are submitting and voting up.  More on Digg Spy here: Digg Spy 2.0 Released.  While not  helpful in tracking earned referrals, I include it because it’s interesting to click on the different views at top (e.g. Swarm, Arc) to see what people are talking about online.  It may give you some insight in what you could write about that might catch people’s attention.

And finally, some ways to increase earned social media referrals from actual case studies (my boss is going to love this!) of the best practices of the world’s top brands, such as Starbuck’s, Dell and Toyota.  From ENGAGEMENTdb:

• Launch a blog, forum or Wiki where customers can submit, comment on and vote for their favorite ideas to help your brand, with someone from every department at the company acting as a liaison.  Encourage customer engagement by implementing a reward point system for different activities, such as maintaining a blog, responding to forum questions, or adding to a Wiki page.
• Create an official Facebook brand page, even taking over ownership of the largest customer-created communities.
• Use Twitter as an “in the moment” channel to deliver timely customer support and spread word about the latest breaking news and contests.
• Be cautious about allowing employees to engage with customers via social channels, to make sure there is consistency in approach, and be ready to shut down anything not sanctioned.
• If you are going to engage customers online, you have to have a plan, make sure that resources are available, and be in it for the long haul.
• Start a YouTube channel to showcase video content.  Pull video content from around the organization, such as training videos.
• Create an “activity stream” of company-generated content such as videos, community and industry news.  That information can be pushed into blogs, tweets, video, photos, etc.
• Work closely with outside blogs not affiliated with your brand, by providing access, information and support.  This can be especially effective if you have no plans to launch a blog of your own.
• Monitor Tweets that mention your brand, to respond from respective areas of expertise within your company using CoTweet to manage a “brandlistens” account (see above), or you may choose to have people respond from individual profiles.  Same goes for Facebook, by emailing around comments that need response.
• Treat social media engagement as part of the job, just like phone and email.
• Lastly, when choosing to engage in a channel, be fully engaged.  If you have resource constraints, it is better to be consistent and participate in fewer channels than to spread yourself too thin.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and learned a few new things that will improve your social media ROI.

One good way of arriving at social media metrics is postulated by Heidi Sullivan of Cision Blog: “There are two basic types of ways to measure your impact on the Web: passive and active.” Furthermore, she attempts to break it down into the five senses: sight (where are you seen), sound (who’s talking about you), scent (do they stick around to “smell what you’re cooking”), taste (can they taste what you’re offering through search engines) and touch (are they taking the next step to touch others with your information).

Going back to the passive vs. active concept, here are metrics she suggests as well as from other sources (numbers refer to sources at bottom):

Passive

• Number of unique visitors to your blog.1
• Monthly site views aka page views.1 – Definition: Request to load a single HTML page.  Page views are only important to the degree they play a part in a site’s revenue model. If a site earns much of its revenue from advertising, then page views are important because of their contribution to ad inventory. If a site only earns revenue on sales, then page views are not a key statistic.
• Number of page views per visit.6 – Try landing people on an engaging page that funnels them through a messaging sequence that builds your brand and escalates sales. Measure the results and optimize the path that gets people to the end of the sequence. Also, measure the lift in total page views of your site’s high-value product pages.
• Monthly unique sessions.1 – Definition: In tabulating statistics for Web site usage, a user session (sometime referred to as a visit) is the presence of a user with a specific IP  address who has not visited the site recently (typically, anytime within the past 30 minutes). The number of user sessions per day is one measure of how much traffic a Web site has. A user who visits a site at noon and then again at 3:30 pm would count as two user visits.
• Number of return visits.6
• Search trends.7

Active

• Number of influencers (track who they are for targeting) that share your content through inbound links, citations, tweets, viral videos or other forwarding of information that result in transactions.1,4,6 – put a call to action in your campaign that will lift this metric.
• Number of company/brand mentions in blogs, on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter, as gauged by a social media monitoring solution, especially when supplemented with sophisticated sentiment analysis that discerns positive brand mentions from the negative. 1,7
• Number of people clicking on your images, watching your videos, using your widgets, and spending significant amounts of time on your site.1 – by tagging videos and applications, companies can track each occurrence of sharing and estimates frequency of exposure to particular media.6
• Number of and which keywords/other sites referring visitors to your content.1
• How much money social media has saved or created for your brand: How many issues that you solved, questions that you answered, leads that you created, products that you sold, call volume that you decreased, etc., through social media engagement versus traditional resources.2
• Time spent across an entire campaign.3
• Click rate [on an ad].3 – not the best metric to use.  People can accidentally click and then drop off, or they can click and see it’s not for them and drop off.
• Interaction rates [with an ad].3 – may be influenced by the creative and not a true representation of their interest.
• Conversion rates – doesn’t take into account return conversions or other offline results, e.g. visit to a store for further research.
• Time spent throughout cross channel engagement with the brand – forecast the number of touches a customer can have with a brand and the resultant amount of time spent with the brand, e.g. total number of exposures, visits you’ll drive to the site, increase in total mentions that can be measured with social media monitoring tools.3
  • Once you understand the total touches, you can either measure directly or assume through general patterns what the time spent is across each of these vehicles, and then create a cumulative time spent for the campaign. When you break down the individual media vehicles, time spent is actually quite easy to report on.3
• Lifetime value of customers based on their purchasing activity, which could be higher depending on their level of social media influence, e.g. if a customer is worth $9 dollars alone, but that person has 500 Facebook friends, and is able to drive even 1% of them (5) to make a purchase, that individual’s value could be as high as $54 dollars.4
• Number of people who you capture data from – Eyeblaster has found that the ability to capture data within a banner is nearly eight times more effective at addressing conversions than click-through rates (CTR), revealing that consumers are more likely to fill in a banner than click on it.5
• Number of people who opt into your e-newsletter/email updates (e-newsletter metrics to be discussed under separate, future posting).6
  
• Number of people who download materials from your site.6
• Number of phone calls you receive and source.6
• Number of people that share comments and opinions.6
• The impact individuals exert on wider audiences – a combination of data obtained from buzz-tracking with data from surveying (see below), to determine the probability of viewing buzz by taking into account the volume of relevant posts and amount of time spent by panelists on a website.7

And there are also metrics that can only be obtained via surveying, which is what the company work with, C.A. Walker, does:

• Awareness.
  
• Interest.
• Desire.
• Lifts in brand awareness and attitudes attributable to a social media campaign.
• Various actions taken throughout engagement with the brand.
• Usage – may be of a particular website or of a product.
  
• Consideration – may also be inferred from measuring the things that drive people into your (or your client’s) stores.  Actions like store locator queries and rep searches should always be measured and are clear indicators that a future purchase may be imminent.6
• Intent to purchase – may also be inferred from Time spent throughout engagement with the brand. If consumers spend more time than the average, they must be interested in your product or service — and if they are interested, that is a measure of intent.3

If I’ve missed any applicable metrics, please let me know so I can grow this list.

Sources:

1Cision Blog: Five Senses of Online Measurement

2Mashable: Twitter Brand Best Practices

3MediaPost: Time Spent Is The Right Metric To Measure Engagement

4MediaPost: Marketers Search For Social Media Metric

5Eyeblaster: Conversions Remain Important Metric

6ClickZ: 11 Things to Measure Besides Clicks and Conversions

7MediaPost: Media Metrics: Let’s Get This Party Started