How Champagne Can Help You Achieve Social Media ROI

I attended a great presentation at Blogworld Expo in New York earlier this month on social media ROI by Clay Hebert, Chief Engagement Officer at Tribes Win, a social strategy and innovation consultancy. I liked this session a lot and I asked Clay if he would kindly compile some some notes to accompany the slides so I could share them with you.  See what you think!

Got any questions for Clay? Post ‘em in the comments.

NOTES FROM CLAY HEBERT

• Slide 5-13 – One of the most underused “secret weapon” social media sites is Twitter’s advanced search. This specific example shows how Southern Hospitality, a barbeque restaurant in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, used Twitter advanced search to craft a single tweet that resulted in $220 in profit and a 900% ROI.
• Slide 11 – There is only one true formula for calculating Return on Investment (ROI). It is simply:

• [Profit Gained minus Cost] divided by [Cost] x 100.

• Slides 14-15 – The profit and ROI from Southern Hospitality’s tweet was not realized until months later, illustrating how social media is a long-term marathon not a short-term sprint. Just like nobody wouldn’t run a long organized race with no defined distance, marketers shouldn’t run expensive marketing campaigns without specific, defined objectives.
• Slide 16 – Baselines are not just for tennis. To measure indirect impact of social media efforts and ROI, organizations must define not only objectives (what they want to achieve) but baselines (where they currently are).
• Slide 17 – Consultants and marketers who aren’t capable of understanding and proving Social Media ROI through baselines, objectives, strategies and tactics resort to made up metrics like Return on Ignorance, Return on Engagement or Return on Conversation. As Dave Fleet mentioned in his session, it’s time we “declare war on made up metrics!”
• Slide 18 – I recounted a client engagement when I was working to define objectives and baselines with a large national hotel chain. An obvious objective for a hotel chain is to increase the number of incoming reservation calls (which could be impacted by putting the reservation number visibly in the hotel’s social media profiles). The GM of the local hotel didn’t think it was possible to baseline the number of incoming phone calls, a relatively simple measure that could be tracked with a pen and Post-It note.
• Slide 21 – There are so many social media tools and platforms, it’s easy to get distracted chasing the latest shiny new tool. Ignore the myriad of tools until you specifically define goals and objectives. Then use those objectives to help inform selection of the appropriate tools and tactics.
• Slides 22-28 – Marketers are often smarter than professional athletes, yet professional athletes are never confused whether their season was a success or not. This is because athletes have a clearly defined “Champagne Moment” (the moment when they spray perfectly good champagne all over each other in the locker room). Win the championship. That’s it. A singular goal that never changes. As marketers, we must do a better job of defining the specific objectives of our marketing initiatives.
• Slides 29-32 – Sports wouldn’t be sports if we didn’t keep score. Twitter followers may help with jersey or ticket sales (a viable objective for the team’s marketing department) but they don’t help stop the Patriots in the Super Bowl (the singular objective for the players and coaches).
• Slides 32-38 – Objectives should be defined using the SMART methodology (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic and Timebound). This can be simply framed even more simply as: “increasing or decreasing a specific metric by a defined amount over a defined period of time.”
• Slides 39-40 – Different departments will have very unique “Champagne Moments”.
• Slides 47-55 – There are many smart and generous practitioners to follow to learn more about analytics and social media. Here are four:

• Avinash Kaushik - @avinash
• Olivier Blanchard - @thebrandbuilder
• Christopher S. Penn - @cspenn
• Chuck Hemann - @chuckhemann
• Hiten Shah – @hnshah  (I forgot a slide for Hiten in the deck, but he’s brilliant.)

• Slides 56-63 – While I implore marketers to focus first on defining their Champagne Moment using the SMART objectives methodology, once that is done there are a number of tools that can assist in defining baselines, measuring analytics, conversions, trends and impact. I highlight a few of my favorites:

• Google Analytics – http://analytics.google.com
• Argyle Social – http://www.argylesocial.com
• awe.sm – http://awe.sm
• Row Feeder – http://www.rowfeeder.com
• Cyfe – http://www.cyfe.com

• Slide 64 – Many use the hashtag #measure when discussing digital analytics and social media measurement on Twitter. Follow it for interesting discussions, blog posts, links and tools.

Link to Slideshare 

http://spnd.ws/SMROI-BWENY