Social Media Marketing

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asked. Innovations arise that would not otherwise arise. The business actually runs—

from the ground up—in ways that delight the customer. We had a universal metric at

Progressive Insurance, where I spent a number of years as a product manager: We used

the Combined Operating Ratio, or COR, a fundamental measure of performance that

everyone understood. It predated the Net Promoter Score and was a fundamentally

different measure to be sure. While the COR was a business operations performance

metric instead of a customer experience metric, by sharing the COR across the entire

organization everyone became focused on their specific impact to the proper operation

of the business. The result was an organization that worked like a team.

Whether you follow the Net Promoter Score or an alternative yardstick, beyond

the core measures that indicate the relative likelihood of favorable conversations, you’ll

want to connect these metrics with your current business analytics. What’s required

first is a baseline. You can generate a baseline for your social analytics using any social

analytics package that supports raw data export: Alterian’s SM2 is one such platform

that provides this capability. This makes it easier—but still not simple—to integrate

social and business metrics. The objective is to identify and track the social measures

that have predictive or associative value when used with your current marketing

metrics.

By beginning with the connection of your marketing metrics and the social ana-

lytics, you’ll discover up front the degree to which the Social Web is impacting your

marketing program, either positively or negatively. Begin by creating a baseline: Social

analytics tools like SM2 provide two years of history so you can actually run regres-

sion analysis on social metrics such as daily volume and sentiment against the business

metrics you have collected over the past years. You’ll end up throwing a lot of your

work away, but that’s OK: You’ll find the subset of key business indicators that are

closely aligned with social analytics. With this work completed, you can assign relative

values to the change in social analytics by matching the values of the corresponding

changes in business metrics.

However you do this, the important step is “to do it.” Begin with the data you

have, and line it up over a period of years with the social data. You’ll come away with

a defensible case for why you need (or why you don’t need) to invest in social-media-

based marketing, and you’ll have created the baseline data that you need to evaluate a

Hands-On: Social Business Fundamentals

What Not to Do (and What to Do Instead)

In the prior section, I presented three “must do” activities: establishing a listening pro-

gram, encouraging collaboration externally and internally, and aggressively measur-

ing (because you can). These three activities are built around the main lessons of Part

I of this book: Listening and understanding the root causes of the conversations you

discover, moving customers up the engagement path toward advocacy by encouraging