Organizations: Verizon (Mobile phones), Weather Channel (weather news), Dove (soap), Moxie (Ad Agency)
Name of Contact: Jessica Carruth, Senior Marketing and PR Manager, Moxie
Website References: moxieusa, cmosurvey, youtube, marketingthink, mckinseyonmarketingandsales, Verizon, theweatherchannel, Dove, Amazon
Social media is like giving a customer a megaphone. His or her voice can be heard on so many levels and places and it can be shared and liked and re-tweeted instantly; globally. The implications of these voices can be measured. And it has been said that without measurement, investment is a bluff: “What do I get for what I put in?”
According to a 2013 survey of marketing executives by McKinsey Marketing, seven out of ten of marketers do not believe their organizations have effective advanced-analytics capabilities. So, they fail to understand what marketing and sales initiatives have worked and why, and how to plan for growth.
McKinsey Marketing blogger Jayne Eastman said in her April 2015 blog about the broken marketing process:
“Analytics must do more than just tell you what happened;
it must tell you why.”
What kinds of tools are available for analyzing Social Media efforts?
There are a multitude of tools to help businesses collect social media data and break it down into reportable information that can be used to analyze how their social networks are performing.
Hootsuite, Simply Measured, Klout, Buffer, SproutSocial, Sprinklr, Google Analytics and many more, can combine the data from your different social networks and present them to you in charts and graphs, manageable data that you can gain insights from.
The CMO Survey, a service that collects and disseminates the opinions of top marketers in order to predict the future of markets, recently released the results of the frequency of social media metric used by companies. It was observed that fewer companies were using actual purchase activities or financial outcomes as metrics to evaluate their social media programs:
David Edelman, a partner with McKinsey Marketing, explains how measuring ROI of social media has to take into account the goals for each stage of the customer decision journey. A social GRP can help marketers see and measure the value of social, as well as create a consistent metric for comparing against other media.
Nichole Kelly, author of How to Measure Social Media, says social media is a tool in your marketing tool belt. She offers measuring tips in this 6 minute podcast:
Social Media Moxie
I chatted with a Senior Marketing and PR executive at Moxie – a forward thinking Atlanta-based advertising firm – about its approach to measuring social media metrics. I was not able to properly record my interview with Jessica Carruth, but I did get a feel for the company’s stand on analyzing social media:
“Analytics is not simply reporting, but a fundamental approach to the way we work,” Carruth said. “Since social media is so intertwined with other mediums, we first try to understand how the consumer uses content across the entire marketing ecosystem. This approach helps us identify and understand what content is driving action. Equipped with these insights, we’re able to refine and shift our approach to make the most of our clients’ efforts across every channel, platform and device.”
Moxie analyzes and creates reports for clients (and an impressive list it is) while boiling down compelling items into a dashboard for easy month-to-month assessment. Examples of metric tools they use include: Crimson Hexagon, Simply Measured, and Sprinklr.
Verizon Wireless:
One of Moxie’s clients is Verizon Wireless. Verizon wanted to drive awareness about the launch of its 4G LTE network. To achieve this aim, they needed a medium through which they could resonate with consumers while maximizing their reach. Online video was the answer. Moxie created content especially for them — a series of quick, fun, high‑impact videos that got our message across in 30 seconds or less. The strategy worked. Click‑through rates exploded, and according to Carruth, three of the mini‑commercials Moxie created were ranked in the top 10 most viewed videos on Verizon’s YouTube channel. Here is a link to all of the videos on Moxie’s website.
The Weather Channel:
Here is a clever example of measuring a social media effort by The Weather Channel. In April 2013, to promote Tornado Week, interns at The Weather Channel transformed their office into a Tweet-powered tornado simulation, putting the Twittersphere in charge of the wind speed. For each mention of #TornadoWeek, the wind speed in the office was elevated.
The goal was to grab 1 million Twitter mentions to turn up the wind for a full-blown EF-5 tornado of at least 200 mph. The campaign ran simultaneously on mobile devices, with two TV specials and a live-streaming YouTube event of the interns’ office blasted by wind machines:
The campaign didn’t quite reach its goal, garnering just over 50,000 tweets, which in turn created wind speed of 140 mph. Some bloggers say this was a social media fail. But The Weather Channel received a lot of publicity for its campaign, with articles in Huffington Post, AdWeek, ABC News and more, which no doubt put some extra wind beneath its Tornado Week viewership wings.
Dove:
Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches campaign in 2013 “took real women and interviewed them about their thoughts on their own appearances,” notes SEO and social media consultant Misty Faucheux. The aim was to help girls and women boost self-confidence and get them to realize, as the campaign tagline says, “You are more beautiful than you think.”
Instead of holding women up to supermodel standards, the campaign directly addressed women’s insecurities. In doing so, it “created the personal connection many companies strive for but never achieve,” said Faucheux.
By late May of that year, Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches went beyond viral to become the most-watched online video ad of all time, according to Unilever. As of this writing, the campaign’s homepage had received 18,000 tweets, 681,000 Facebook likes, and 2,400 Google +1 endorsements.
Lessons:
- Know which measurement tools work best for your company.
- Even when you don’t reach your goals, your efforts will still get noticed. You just have to find out by whom.
- Its okay to hire a consultant to help you with your social media measurements.
- Refine and shift your marketing efforts based on your results.
- It’s not just the financials (purchasing activities) you need to look at when measuring your social media efforts.
Submitted by: Elizabeth Cooper, SMBP Student, University of Waterloo
To contact the author of this entry please email at: bettycoop99@gmail.com
If you have any concerns to the accuracy of anything posted on this site, please send to Peter Carr, Programme Director, Social Media for Business Performance.