Social Media ROI – Measuring the Quantitative and Qualitative Results

I was recently invited to speak on Social Media at the Startup Saturday Event in Pune.

During my interactions with various organizations and people, I realized that while many people do agree that social media is powerful and should be used for marketing; lot of them are concerned about the ROI and the measurement of the same. This made me choose “Social Media ROI – Why, What and How?” as the topic for the speaker session.

Here is an excerpt of what was covered in the session.



As a first step, we need to acknowledge that social media a combination of psychology, sociology and technology. So while defining the social media strategy for your company/ brand, you need to be extremely cautious about ALL these aspects.

The next thing is the approach which is taken while planning the social media campaigns. The ideal approach is: 

1. Define Goal
2. Identify Tools
3. Decide Approach
4. Execute

Many of the social media campaigns do not yield the desired results because many companies and brands directly jump to execution without going through the first three steps.

Companies need to first define as to what exactly they would like to achieve from their social media campaign – is it customer feedback, user engagement, leads or sales. Once the goal is defined, companies need to choose the right tools. For example: Although Twitter and Facebook are the popular social media platforms, there is no point in being on Facebook if your target audience hangs out on MySpace! Once the tools are identified, get a clear consensus on the approach and tone of your communication. And then the final step is execution.

Assuming that you followed all the steps and have started with your social media campaign, the next question comes to mind is – how do I calculate the Return on Investment (ROI). While considering the ROI, you need to decide what exactly you want to measure? Because social media has got “media” which has quantitative measurement matrices and “social” which has qualitative measurement matrices. By quantitative measurement matrices, I mean number of leads or increase in sales/ revenue. By qualitative measurement matrices, I mean interaction, feedback, loyalty, passion and brand awareness.

Here are some examples which describe how companies have got both, qualitative as well as quantitative ROI through social media.

ROI Examples - QUANTITATIVE

1. Southwest Airlines: Southwest Airlines attributes more than $1 million in additional ticket sales to its presence on Twitter.
2. Marriott: Marriott has made more than $5 million in bookings from people who clicked through to the reservation page from Marriott's blog.
3. Dell: Dell Outlet made more than $6.5M sale through its Twitter presence.
4. Lenevo: Lenovo attributed a 20% reduction in call center activity to use of a community website for answers.
5. Naked Pizza: 68.60% of total dollar sales for Naked Pizza came from customers who said they are “calling from twitter”. 
6. Blendtec: Increased sales 5x by running the humorous "Will it Blend" Videos on YouTube.

ROI Examples - QUALITATIVE

1. Starbucks: Generated lot of new product ideas by asking users what want from Starbucks.
2. TurboTax: TurboTax started a Twitter campaign to respond and answer questions during key tax season. This helped them in establishing themselves as experts in their field whom the users could trust for opinion.
3. Kogi Korean BBQ: Uses Twitter to let the customers know where the truck was and when it would be in their neighborhood. This made the customers happy and of course more number of customers for Kogi.
4. Comcast: Provides customer support on Twitter which has got it more satisfied customers who are happy to receive instant online support
5. Home Depot: Appreciates technical support employees on Twitter - Whoever provides the support through support tags the tweet with his/ her name. Customers love this because they exactly know who is supporting them and the employees’ moral is boosted with such public appreciation!

So, in a nutshell, for a successful social media campaign:

- DEFINE what you want to measure

- DEFINE your message and tone

- DECIDE your approach

- SELECT appropriate tools

- EXECUTE with diligence and consistency

If you have any more examples of successful social media campaigns, do share those as comments!

Building Pre-Launch Buzz – Mix of Creativity, Diligence and Focus

While launching a new product, many miss out on pre-launch buzz, that is creating buzz about the product and making people interested in it even before the product is launched. The concept of pre-launch buzz is not new. Film industry has been using it for many years.  The purpose of pre-launch buzz is to create desire, need and excitement for the product in the market. With this, when the product becomes available, it starts selling like hot cake.

The best way to use the pre-launch phase is to warm up the market, your prospects, your customers. Use this time to engage with the market, look for feedback, ask questions, address objections, conduct surveys and answer questions.

I believe that for the pre-launch buzz to be successful, it needs to have a right mix of creativity, diligence and focus.

Creativity: Pre-launch buzz creation definitely requires a lot of creativity. Rather than going by the regularly mentioned things like putting up a teaser, offering a whitepaper etc, you need to identify what will appeal to your audience, what will excite them and what will make them talking about your product/ service? Of course, this requires a thorough understanding of your market, research of your target group, your competition (if any), detailed understanding of the problem you are trying to solve and so on.

Focus: What do you want to achieve from your pre-launch buzz creation campaign?  What exactly do you mean by creating buzz? Yes, the end result is to get more customers or users for your product, but that need not be the sole objective of your campaign. You need to widen the scope and achieve more than that. As mentioned above, some of it could be getting some insights through surveys, handling objections, establishing your thought leadership in the market and so on.

Diligence: The reason I have included this factor here is because the pre-launch is a delicate and sensitive phase in your product lifecycle. It could make or break the product. The right kind of buzz can make the product very successful while a poorly executed pre-launch campaign can make the product introduced with a negative impression. So spend some good, quality time in planning and executing your pre-launch buzz campaign. Spend dedicated time in managing the campaigns and monitor the responses carefully.

I recently came across an interesting pre-launch buzz campaign. This company, IDYeah Labs, has not yet revealed what it is planning to launch but has just introduced a contest asking its Facebook fans to guess what it is up to? Certainly an interesting and welcome effort of using social media (only) for creating the buzz. Let us wait and watch how it works out for the company.

Have you come across any pre-launch buzz campaign which really appealed to you?

Cricket World Cup 2011 Advertising: Which One Caught Your Attention?

All the conversations these days are revolving around the Cricket World Cup. Many a times, I am a silent observer and few times an active participant in such conversations around who will win the match, who played better, how a catch should have been taken or how it was missed and so on. As a marketer, I heard many conversations as to which company is doing well in terms of its branding and promotion and which could have done better.

Surprisingly, as a consumer, I don't hear many conversions revolving around which brand has got some great deal, which is my preferred drink while watching the match, which watch will I wear this cricket season or which pizza I will order when India plays.

Although the consumers are not consciously taking any decisions about choosing any particular brand, companies are spending heftily on branding and advertising during this Cricket season. Because these ads and campaigns are unconsciously playing a very important role in making the consumers choose a particular brand.

Companies now are choosing multiple options like TV channels, websites, social media, SMS, email, videos etc to reach out to consumers. But, in this clutter, it has become harder to get the required attention and mindset of consumer. It is no surprise that brands are coming up with innovative and catchy ways for making their presence felt.

As a consumer, following few campaigns caught my attention:

1. Amul: Amul butter has tied up with Netherlands team. The Dutch team is sporting Amul logos on their jerseys. “Why not India team”, because “It is not available” comes the response from Amul. This is being treated as a very smart move by Amul because it has already generated a lot of buzz!
2. LG Mobile: LG has set up a ‘LG mobile army’ where it is recruiting 2,500 cadets from 38 cities to cheer inside stadiums.
3. Lays Flavor World Cup 2011: I liked the way Lays generated the curiosity and buzz even ahead of the World Cup and slowly unveiled its six new flavors. It won’t be a surprise to see Lay’s revenue going up with these ads
4. Brands on Social Media: Many brands such as Pizza Hut, Adidas, Smith and Jones, KFC are promoting deals through social media channels including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Good use of social media I would say.

Are there any campaigns which caught your attention as a consumer?

Taking Marketing Contribution Beyond Marketing Department

Most of the times, marketing is a separate department in the organizations. There is a ‘marketing team’ which handles all the aspects such branding, positioning, pricing etc. Well, it probably worked well in past when there were only handful ways of reaching out to users. However, with the new age of social media, don’t you think the definition of marketing has expanded to blogging, managing customer comments, reviews, creating and managing social media presence, analyzing results and all such things? Marketing has become a lot about conversation.

I believe that a lot of people in the company – outside the marketing department - can very well participate in this conversation with the users of your products and services.

How? Imagine this:

• Your engineers writing a blog article about the latest technology which your company has mastered
• Your support engineer providing responses to user queries on your online community and resolving issues – beyond email, phone or chat support
• Your technical engineer creating a video on using a particular feature in your product and posting it on YouTube
• Your sales teams posting interesting, informative and educative presentations on presentation sharing websites
• Your content writer gathering inputs about a latest paradigm by participating in discussion forums
• Your technical architect writing a post about a latest, cutting-edge technology and inviting comments from other tech-savvy people around

The list can just go on. So what’s happening here? Variety of people and not just the marketing team are contributing in creating an image, a brand about the company by utilizing their knowledge. Isn’t it great? What more can you expect when the best and experts are in action!

Well, I am convinced on this because I have tried this. Do you think it’s time for you to take a leap in this direction?

Be ‘Informed’ in Negotiations

In my earlier blog articles, ‘The Power of Power in Negotiations’ and ‘3 Golden Rules about time in Negotiations’, I presented the importance of 'Power' and 'Time' in negotiations as explained by Herb Cohen in his book 'You can Negotiate Anything'. In this post, we will have a look at ‘Information’ as the third crucial aspect in negotiations.

Negotiation, as Herb mentions, is not an event, but is a process. Information is at the heart of all negotiations. The more information you have about the other side about their needs, their real deadline and priorities, the more advantage you have. Chances of getting this information during the negotiations are rare.

So what to do? Start early. The earlier you start, the easier it is to gather information. Herb explains that it is a myth that the more informed and flawless we appear, the more easily we will get the information. In fact, the opposite is true. The more confused and defenseless we appear, the more easily we will get information and advice.

Where do you get information? From anywhere! Talk to the associates, people who are working or have worked with the person with whom you are going to meet at the negotiation event. If it is not possible to make such a direct contact with other side’s associates, find other ways. Make use of third parties, speak with people who have negotiated or dealt with them in past. Try to gather information from publications, journals etc.

Now, during the actual negotiation event, practice effective listening techniques. On careful concentration on what’s going on, you can learn more about other side’s deadlines, feelings, motivations and real needs. It will also help you listen to what is being said as well as what is not being necessarily said. You will be able to better interpret and understand the cues which could be unintentional, verbal or behavioral.

The key piece of information any negotiator would like to get is about the real limits of the other party or how much are they willing to sacrifice to make the deal. Many a times, this can be obtained by observing the concession behavior on the part of the other side.

In a nutshell, to be successful in negotiations, gather as much information as you can about the other party. For gathering information, start early. Practice listening technique during negotiation event and observe. The more information you have about the other party, the more power you will have in the bargain.

So here we come to the end of this 3 part series about crucial aspects for successful negotiations. Hope you enjoyed reading these articles.

Do share your comments with fellow blog readers!

Social Media ROI – Measurement Metrics

There is lot of excitement, curiosity and confusion around social media marketing. On one hand, there are a lot of organizations which are joining the social media bandwagon just because everyone seems to be there. On the other hand, there are others who are looking for ways to measure the ROI before they get into social media marketing.

For those looking for ROI measurement, I think the first thing they need to do is to think a little differently. I believe that the ROI measurement needs to go beyond number of visits and clicks etc. Here, conversation is more important than conversion. I suggest, before you start with social media marketing, first clearly define your objectives: Are you looking for leads and sales, are you looking to build a community of engaged and involved prospects and customers, are you looking to create brand awareness, are you looking to gather new ideas or are you looking to create online brand?

Once the objectives are defined, I think measurements become easier because the measurement metrics change based on those. Just be careful to not get excited about worthless metrics like ‘number of followers or fans’. Remember to also focus on quality and not just quantity. Here, the measurement metrics could be ‘the kind of people following your blog’, ‘number of influencers who tweet about you’, ‘number of people who actually used your TwtQpon’, ‘kind of engagement around a discussion on your Facebook wall’, ‘Number of retweets you get and from whom’, ‘reduction in support investment because of support through online community’, ‘number of new features your product users suggested to you’ and so on.

Here are some of the successful social media campaigns. There are many such successful campaigns. I have just picked these few:

1. Starbucks: Starbucks started MyStarbucksidea. Here, Starbucks asked its customers as to what they want from Starbucks. The social media success metric in this case would be number of suggestions gathered, number of unique suggestions which the company might not have thought of and number of suggestions which the company actually implemented.
2. Dell: Dell announces offers and promotions on Twitter. Here, the ROI is clearly measurable in terms of sales coming from Twitter, the number of people who availed the ‘Twitter Exclusive’ offers.
3. Target: The retail chain Target donates 5% of its income to charity. Last year, it decided to donate the money to charities which are selected by Facebook users. It did ‘Bullseye Gives’ campaign which essentially was a voting application connected to Target’s existing Facebook page. On this, it allowed users to select which charities they would like to see the funds. Money was given based on percentages. Here, Target not only just did good through charity, but it also increased the fan following of the brand. It can now be able to communicate with these fans in future.

As we see, the ROI metrics go beyond click through and more towards audience engagement and involvement.

Do you have any thoughts on measuring social media ROI?

3 Golden Rules About Time in Successful Negotiations

In my earlier blog post ‘The Power of 'Power' in Negotiations’, I presented the importance of power in negotiations as explained by Herb Cohen in his book 'You can Negotiate Anything'. In this post, we will have a look at ‘Time’ as the second most crucial aspect in negotiations.

Herb describes 3 golden rules about time.

Rule #1: The passage of time affects negotiations in a very significant way. In any negotiation, the consensus or settlement action happens close to the deadline. So be patient. Patience pays. Wait for a favorable moment to act. When not sure, do nothing.

Rule #2: Never reveal your real deadline to the other side. Deadlines can be flexible. Never blindly follow a deadline but evaluate the real benefits. The ‘other side’, no matter what they try to show, always has a deadline.

Rule #3: Don't take an extreme action unless it is advantageous for you, cautions Herb. Many a times, as the deadline approaches, you might observe a sudden change in power. Because, as we know from rule #1, with the passage of time, although people remain the same, circumstances do change!

Social Buzz Creation through Unusual Celebration of Usability Day

A recent post about FREE website design on one of the social networking sites caught my attention. Well, it was for two reasons: 1) It was offering one FREE website design and 2) which is more peculiar is that the occasion which this company chose for this contest is the "World Usability Day".

Honestly, I had not heard of this day until I saw this post. All of us talk about (like experts) about usability in everything – phones, ipod, TV set, DVD and what not. But I don’t think many of us pay special attention to this aspect when it comes to designing products or experiences. The company, IDYeah Creations, which has announced this contest, offers usability services and UI solutions.

I thought this contest is a very interesting thing for few reasons:

1. By celebrating “Usability Day”, the company is showcasing its passion about usability
2. Website is something which every business needs and probably by doing one FREE website, the company will create an example of how to design a user friendly website and demonstrate the power of usability
3. The amount of buzz this is creating – of course there is some freebie, but more for its uncommon celebration of a not-usually-celebrated day. The company has said that it will choose the winners based on ‘genuine’ need and I am sure many people (like me) are thinking about how to demonstrate the genuine need – more controversy, more buzz!

Things like these convince me that social media and buzz creation have immense potential - provided you add a little bit of creativity to it.

I will be keen to see the website of the lucky winner which IDYeah creates!

Our Internet Marketing and Social Media Marketing Workshop was a Great Success!

A half day workshop on October 27^th, 2010 organized by Midas Touch Consultants was a great success with professionals from variety of streams attending it.

Amongst the audience, we had CEO and marketing professionals of India’s leading antivirus software company, former MD of a well known software product engineering and quality engineering services organization, Owner of a usability services organization, Sales Consultants, Co-founder of an organization providing expert services in the area of software testing and quality engineering, Head of Strategy and Consulting from a Outsourced Enterprise Product Sales consulting organization, Head of Marketing of leading Thermal Insulation Material dealers, CEO of a public relations and communications company, Strategic Marketing Consultant, Event Head from an enthusiastic startup and also a student who is leaving for an overseas job soon.

The workshop covered various aspects in online marketing such as Website Optimization, Web Analytics, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing. With lot of real-life examples, it made it easier for the attendees to understand the concepts.

The most enjoyable part of the workshop for me, as a presenter, was the very enthusiastic and participative audience. Through their questions and participation, they made sure that they understand whatever is being explained in the session. Not only this, they also asked lot of questions relevant to their own area of business. The collaborative learning gave good insights to everyone. The discussions revolved around how online marketing can be used for consumer products, how it can be applied for software products, services or to niche enterprise products and how social media can be used for enhancing personal brand.

For revision of concepts, we played a nice game (built using Harbinger’s YawnBuster software). The correct answers to the questions asked during the game convinced me that the audience has well grasped the concepts. Even post the afternoon break where we all relished on some yummy snacks, the participation levels were as high as before and there was absolute no lull – either the snacks were not tasty or the presenter engaged the audience with interesting discussion topics – and I would like to believe in the later one -:)

I felt especially good when one of the participants coming all the way from Mumbai mentioned that the workshop was worth her travel!

Thanks everyone for making it such a great event and for those who missed it, we look forward to see you next time!

Product Launch Checklist and More….

Okay, so now you have completed conceptualizing a product idea, the design is ready and your engineers have started building it. What next? You obviously gear up to make a big launch of the product.

What is the checklist you need to go through before you can say that you are ready for the launch from the marketing perspective?

Here are some items which I think are important:

• Naming the product
• Product messaging
• Product positioning
• Target market segmentation
• Sales strategy
• Pricing and introduction offers strategy
• Marketing plan preparation
• Advertising channel identification and finalization
• Channels identification (?)

Coming to more of operational items: 

• Logo and website design
• Search Engine Optimization
• Literature Preparation (brochures, flyers, conference panels etc)
• Sales tools preparation – whitepapers, demos, FAQs etc
• Press release
• Newsletter preparation and opt-in management
• Social media promotion strategy and preparation for the same - you can’t avoid this if you want to reach out masses in a short time

Can anything more be added to this list?

Once you have the checklist ready, what do you think is the best way to plan and execute these items so that none of these are sidelined just because “we don’t have time right now!” or "we can always do those later"?