Social Media Wave- Social Media Marketing Agency

I was just reading an article titled "Starbuck's clobbers all consumer brands on Social Media" and thought the results seemed sort of strange in terms of how we should be measuring ROI via concrete metrics.

The source cited for the data was none other than Social Media think tank "Famecount". Mapping your results against Lady GaGa is surefire way to measure your brand's KPI's now isn't it? I am sure the brand managers are breaking their arms on each other's backs with congratulations over this milestone.

The source of the data is the Social Web- not a problem with that, but the metrics of the major SN's quantitative totals of Fans, Followers and Subscribers respectively is a sheer clusterpoop of "relevant" data.

More meaningful would be the 4 major business objective categories of:

1. Useful Dialogue
2. Active Advocacy
3. Self Support Indicies
4. Feedback for Innovation 

Each objective should have a mapping to a set of measurable KPI's  and formulae to calculate the "movement of the needle with meaningful measurement". Things to be looking for are comments, mentions and recommendations for example- clear indicators of engagement into multi channel and multi dimensional interactions with the brand.

This type of measurement requires some tools and processes to get started -some of which you can benchmark for free, but to determine variable sentiment analysis ( a hybrid of sources and processing algorithms meaningful to your business objectives) will require the use of some more sophisticated monitoring tools. (Yes beyond the Famecount pointer)

We will be blogging more about SM metrics and developing an active framework that we will be offering as a workshop in the very near future- because articles like this make it necessary to divert fantasy from ROI in Social Media.