Quantifying social media marketing/advocacy

Had a couple of really good questions from clients last week. Surprisingly they did not come from some of the more digitally savvy clients we manage but rather from two very 'old school' ones. In short, it revolves around how we quantify online advocacy... and more importantly, how does an agency get compensated for this.

Trust me, these questions was not part of 'negotiations' but truly asked to find an answer. At that moment when asked, I really had nothing to say... it really was a good question(s).

However, now I think about it, there may be a couple of ways I would look at putting quantifiable metrics and then put a revenue model around it.

In the mid-nineties, I remember working with a colleague of mine at Ogilvy PR in HK on a project for a Japanese tobacco manufacturer. As you can expect with the Japanese, measurement of success is a very strong component of their business and almost everything we do must have some form of metrics attached. I am pretty sure it's not new to all you PR practitioners out there but for a 'direct marketing' dude, it was an eye opener.

End of the day, the success of any PR campaign is measured by the amount of coverage (free or paid) any specific event/activity. On the most basic level, it's tracking the number of press articles about the event/activity. Obviously the more generated (positive of course) means the campaign was successful.

The question that was asked to her was roughly similar which is how to you quantify success since a) not all write-ups are positive, b) not all publications are of equal stature or reachs the right audience, and c) a one liner mention with no photo is not as good as a small para with photo.

Her solution: a point system which gave a specific point value to each 'type' of write-ups. The points vary dependent on the factors above. Of course these points are weighted and agreed to with the client before implementing. Now we start looking at a simple to understand point driven system to quantify PR and subsequent business value.

So, as you know, my belief that digital marketing is nothing 'new'... all it is a variation on the theme... meaning 'social media marketing/online advocacy programs' is just a variation on what PR practioners, DM specialists, we as people... have been doing for y0nks.... in other words, it's influencer marketing via social media platforms VERSUS a targeted DM with a MGM component, a focus group, a Fam trip for influential journalists, etc.

With this said and in this context, can we not use the point system to quantify online advocacy? Does this make sense? Due to the speed of information transfer in the blogosphere... is it even possible? Now that we put a point system together, can we put a monetary value next to them too so we can start looking at business value versus just success metrics?

Again my answer is still 'not sure' but it is something worth exploring and see if it works or not. End of the day, in order to drive digital marketing growth, digiteers must always strive to ID and establish clear accountability metrics to prove the value to clients.

Well... for those of you who reads this post... come to this week's WW since Ken will be there to share his thoughts and lessons learned whilst running Habbo Hotel. We can chat about this further (if you really want to :-)

Talk soon.