Comments on: 10 Social Media benchmarks, what are your plans for 2010?

By: Yann Ropars

Yann Ropars — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:00:00 +0000

Katie, I agree with the 20th century ways except that they still do spend hard cash on social media. What I find interesting is that many other marketing method are notoriously wasting $ may simply annoy customers who are not ready to buy.
Thanks for your data point with automation accuracy, could you point me to your source? We actually do suggest more manual work than my post may have suggested. It really depends of the brand size. Large corp may use those to aggregate as manual work would be too time consuming.

By: Katie Paine

Katie Paine — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:53:55 +0000

The problem is that people keep trying to “measure” social media in 20th century ways — by expecting to be able to count “eyeballs” or reach. The reality is that best metrics have nothing to do with how loud you are yellilng at people, but are focused on cost savings, efficiency, or sales.
One word of caution in your list. Relying on automated sentiment analysis is a good way to destroy your credibility with senior management. Automated tools are only about 60% accurate, so when you dig into the actual results, you are apt to get some very silly results. So if I, a New Englander, say that “the new Win 7 is wicked good” that will come up as a negative. They are a long way away from reliable results.

By: Yann Ropars

Yann Ropars — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 23:36:09 +0000

Thanks Adam, short-term driven marketers may indeed feel that it’s less quantifiable when in fact the long-tail activities of social media can carry much longer. Being relevant in any relationship rarely take 2mn except if you’re ready to buy and move on. It’s Advent month isn’t it? Happy December!

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:22:57 +0000

I just read an article that was critical of social media. One of the greatest criticisms was that you couldn’t quantify the results of your marketing.
Like you said, customers may not engage you directly, but they might be approvingly spectating. If you aren’t getting 150 comments on your blog posts, is that really so important as the fact that you’re being discovered?
(To further counter the other gentleman’s article, page views are a perfectly quantifiable marketing tool.)
Thanks for this post. You brought a lot of great thinking into it.
Adam @Advent Creative Web Design