Quantify this: Get into social media marketing now, measure it later

I recently wrote a story for Chief Business Marketer about Cisco Systems’ efforts to leverage social media marketing tools. The company, one of the most well-known high-tech brands in the B-to-B space, sponsors numerous blogs and has a presence on every social media site you can imagine.

It was interesting then to hear LaSandra Brill, senior manager of global social media at Cisco, say that the San Jose, Calif., company was still in the process of figuring out how to best measure the effect of its social media marketing efforts. Shouldn’t you have a clear-cut way to quantify such programs in mind from the very beginning?

In most cases, that’s definitely true, but the fact is that the tools to accurately quantify the effect of social media marketing are still in their infancy. Companies like Cisco are still tinkering with different options, figuring out which ones are most accurate in their measurements, and best deliver the information they are looking for in the format they desire.

These companies can take a bit more time than usual to quantify social media marketing because of one simple factor–cost. It costs nothing to create a very basic social media presence, such as a Twitter feed, and virtually nothing to do much more with other sites and blogs. Though, if your efforts climb toward the large end of the scale like Cisco’s have, certainly you will want to devote more budget and human resources to those efforts. You’ll want to produce somewhat professional-looking videos for YouTube and make sure you have a customer response rep of some kind monitoring what your customers are saying about you in online forums.

This White Horse research survey suggests that more B-to-B marketers are starting to get into the social media game. For the rest of you, taking the social media plunge is better than staying out of the water. If what’s keeping your marketing efforts out of the social media realm is fear about how you will quantify your programs and realize a return on the investment, then you are missing the point: There is virtually no investment to get started, and virtually everything to gain from getting closer to your customers.