Social Media Marketing

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c h a p t e r

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SOCIAL A

NALYTICS

, M

ETRICS

, AND M

EASUREMENT

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analytics are required to roll up. Social media analytics, web analytics, and influencer

assessments must all be viewed in the context of their relationship to fundamental busi-

ness analytics because they are the metrics that matter to the owners of the budgets

and cost centers that are more likely than not going to be paying for the cost of imple-

menting a social business program. Business analytics joins with social, influencer, and

web analytics on two fronts:

•    Business analytics, especially as related to commerce applications, provides an

additional set of metrics that can be used in the overall effort to document suc-

cess and provide insights for improvement.

•    Business analytics provide the stepping-off point into Social CRM.

Because business analytics relate to the actual business operation, connecting

business analytics to social and web analytics provides an end-to-end picture of the

customer experience—manifesting itself as conversations on the Social Web—with the

internal business processes that created the conversations.

Closest to web analytics are the business metrics associated with your online

commerce pipeline (assuming you have one). For businesses that do some part or all of

their business online (“pure online plays”), the commerce pipeline offers a number of

measurement points. Social commerce platforms from firms like Bazaarvoice excel in

not only improving close rates, increasing checkout value and the cross-selling of related

products, but also in providing continuous, real-time quantitative feedback you can use

to guide and evolve your business offering.

Offline and Nonbusiness Processes

For businesses that do not have a specific online commerce process—for example,

for a cause that is collecting signatures or a business-to-business pre-sales funnel—

the thought process and the approach to business analytics is still largely the same:

The commerce pipeline is simply replaced with the defined conversion process. Tools

like Google Analytics offer well-developed conversion analysis support that you can

use to refine your online programs in the same ways you would any other commerce

process. The connection is this: The objective is to pull together your various sources

of data that supports measurement against KPIs along with the business process met-

rics around your established business metrics. This can be tied back to what you are

observing on the Social Web. This basic metrics-driven methodology is what closes the

feedback loop that the Social Web sets in place: It is this basic feedback loop that will

drive a social business.

The feedback loop defined in the basic relationship between the purchase funnel

and conversations that impact conversion is the connection between the operation of

the business and its marketing effectiveness. This is equally true—though specific met-

rics may change—for commerce applications, for nonprofits and cause-related groups,