So when an economy stutters companies want even more assurance when they buy a service there is a keen return on investment (ROI). We care deeply about this of course and want to explain why companies should spend 10,000 -250,000 EURO a year on this type of monitoring and measurement. It goes without saying that this data needs to fit into decision making processes in communications and senior management, we see this more often in Europe now driven by a more social media savvy marketers and an agency network often driven by more “modern” PR companies. For exact ROI of course we need to talk directly to the brands or agencies but below here is our take on the high level drivers for ROI.

1. Campaign effectiveness: Conversation levels are the new metric, compare successful campaigns (benchmarks) with your own campaign and determine if the levels are good, bad, indifferent. This type of measurement enables companies to see what generates the best word-of-mouth and construct more “buzzy” campaigns. The ROI is driven by making more efficient advertising and targeted communication.

2. Digital brand evaluation: The digital brand is the online component of the brand and the same drivers apply, such as, 

i. Recognition

ii. Recommendability

iii. Customer sentiment

iv. Cultural/Regional factors

By actually measuring the influence the online brand has in social networks, blogs and forums companies can more effectively evaluate what they need to invest both offline and online. More concretely the word-of-mouth drivers for brands in online are not really being evaluated yet, so companies are actually wasting money on campaigns where they are already getting word-of-mouth support or even worse ploughing money into activities than will never get this warm hand of approval.

3. Insurance against issue that arises in social media first: The analogy - monitoring the news tells you the weather outside, monitoring social media tells you the weather forecast over the next weeks. Companies can also track issues back in time, seeing where the issue arose, by consistent monitoring (and storing) they also build a digital memory that can be anlaysed at any time.

4. Organisational benefits: All companies are now monitoring social media, often this is still ad hoc, done by interns, PR or marketing people. This is a good first step but when the volume becomes too high it is untenable. Would a company trust opinion polling to an internal person? Normally they use outside providers, this is becoming the same for social media (impartiality is important). Social media technology and monitoring enables a distinct process and methodology and if the person who handles this leaves the company then there is a system already in place. I have heard of countless examples were the “guy who had the RSS feeds” leaves and takes a whole process and methodology with him - this is not acceptable anymore…

5. Content strategy: Good well structured, timely content is valuable and expensive to produce, by using monitoring tools companies can see what people talk about really and what information they lack e.g. UK bloggers connect to US bloggers regarding medical issues, company sees this need and provides information site for European web users dealing with different regulation and treatment options. This saves money.

6. Targeting: Simply knowing who is influential can help make a product communication happen faster. This isn’t cynical it just shows that companies are listening to the countless discussions out in social media and trying to speak with the right people. There is a pretty well known group of “A” list blogs but there are 10’s of thousands of other highly authorative people that can be reached and are often interested in new products, content and information. This also has an extraordinary impact on search engine optimisation which further drives ROI.

We have put actual numbers on this with clients and it is normally very easy to explain the value. In my opinion companies will start to have more departments that look like a mix of PR/Marketing and these groups will develop around social media expertise. When this starts to happen the ROI discussion will become more about what tools drive the best ROI not that social media monitoring and measurement drives real value…

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