Measuring ROI from an investment of time and resources directed towards a new product, marketing campaign or customer service engagement varies from organization to organization. An organization with longer-term thinking and strategy will value and assess success differently than a business aggressively pursuing quarter-to-quarter improvements.
This is a long post but bear with me as I try and tackle the importance of social media analytics within the context of full business intelligence to measure social ROI.
We’ve talked in the past about the social media maturity curve and how organizations evolve along the curve to develop true social business collaboration. Integrating social media analytics and behaviors into an organization requires an ability to measure these changes both to identify successes and more importantly the efforts that went wide of the mark. But as we all know, or at least entertain a suspicion about, is that some of those false-starts have produced their own important intelligence, which needs to be captured and learned from.
CI’s Approach to Social Analytics
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We’ve identified three steps we believe are critical for creating a measurement framework that will allow you to measure the ROI of your social strategy. A point to keep in mind is that our process does not exclude the importance of other business metrics, rather we treat social as another channel of data – a real-time, always-on, unstructured, expression of voice-of-customer but one that needs the context and validation of other metrics to offer viable insights into your organization’s social strategy.
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INFORM
Social insights are the foundation of your social media intelligence. Our social analytics and text mining technology surfaces key consumer insights, including consideration, intention and demographics. Our technology uses latent semantic analysis, which means your social data is accurate and relevant yet precise enough to surface social profile information for integration into existing CRM or other data management systems. You can also use social media analytics to validate more traditional methods of market research.
Remember this is the data your organization will be using to craft outreach efforts, integrate with existing business metrics and validating more traditional research. And while we have a bias for our unique solution for analyzing social media and private data that doesn’t mean that this step in the process is any less critical.
Can your enterprise listening platform derive this much information from a social media conversation?
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COMBINE
The linchpin of the entire process is integrating and correlating social media with other more traditional metrics to create a 360-view of the customer. Combining business metrics ensures your organization is operating across the enterprise rather than from a single, siloed view of a specific business unit. Your customer has the potential to engage with your organization in a variety of different channels and settings why would you potentially weaken your strategic thinking by basing your conclusions on an incomplete set of metrics.
To modify course direction or change engagement strategies requires ongoing, automated access into enterprise business intelligence, where social media analytics is a critical and complementary element. Having the ability to track changes and emerging trends can influence ROI.
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ENGAGE
Grin and grip. This is where social insights, metrics and strategy for engaging with your customer are implemented and the resulting knowledge used to further refine your understanding of your social customer and the outcomes monitored and validated by other business analytics to measure success or prepare for course correction. Ideally, a process is in place to map consumer intelligence (data analytics) into targeted action (Social CRM, Social BPM, Social Targeting) for in-market recognition.
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Each step is critical to creating true social business collaboration. You can’t skip a step. True social business engagements can only be effectively achieved if the foundation of enterprise social listening, correlation with existing data and mapping of social profiles to internal records can be enabled. This social solution is the outcome of three steps, each one building on the findings and effective integration of the previous phase. It’s a cumulative exercise with value building with the completion of each step.
