For many marketers, metrics are a stumbling block when it comes to social media. Like snowflakes, no two communities are the same. Whether you’re using social media to connect with employees—like McDonald’s—or consumers makes a big difference in how you judge their success. E-Centric recently talked with David Carter, CTO and co-founder of Awareness and Mike Lewis, vice president of marketing of the Waltham, MA-based company about the best ways to gauge the effectiveness of an online community. Awareness recently introduced a prefab, ready-to-deploy, online community building solution.
E-CENTRIC: Do most marketers have a clear expectation of their ROI goals for social media?
CARTER: People are challenging social media and what the ROI of social media is. And that’s a hard question to answer, if you’re not given the ROI of a use of social media. It’s like saying, what’s the ROI of the use of the phone? Well, when I call my sister, none. When I call a client, lots. So social media needs the same kind of purpose.
In the past, people would look at things like page views as a way to see if a site was successful. That works for a corporate voice community—you can gauge how may people read a CEO’s blog post. But if its peer support community, that’s actually a negative metric. How many pages you viewed might indicate you couldn’t find the information you were looking for and were clicking all over the place.
E-CENTRIC: Do you find ROI is a big sticking point for marketers looking to get into online communities, because they just don’t know how to gauge the success accurately?
LEWIS: ROI is a big point for communities and the broader space of social media in general. I think a lot of companies are hearing the buzz words of social media and are trying to figure out how to get into it. But they’re not tying it into business goals. Do they want a return on content provided, or is it judged by reducing support costs, by having peers answer questions for each other?
CARTER: People don’t want to spend right now, unless they’re clear on what they’re going to get back. You can’t just be leading edge, you need to know what it will give you.
E-CENTRIC: What mistakes are you seeing companies make in the social media space?
CARTER: Some aren’t being transparent. You’re putting a face on your company and interacting with your customers. Some companies don’t do a good job of that. They don’t really reveal anything. It just becomes a “personal” way to issue press releases. People spot that in a second. Or companies put it out there and just assume people are so excited about their content that they’ll flock to the site and have conversations. What we tell them is that there are likely already points of enthusiasm in the organization. Use them to draw people into the conversation.
E-CENTRIC: What’s a good example of a company that has done that well?
CARTER: One of the communities we do is for McDonalds and all of their restaurant owners and operators and partners. Thousands and thousands of people. Every two years they have a conference, and last year they wanted to put a nice big graphical button on the community to register. We said, wait a second this is a huge opportunity. People have to go in and fill out a form and say who they are to register for the conference. Why don’t we make that the same form where they update their profile?
Then we decided to push it a little bit. At the end, let’s ask if there’s a best practice you’d like to share with the rest of McDonald’s. If they just created a best practice site for people to share ideas, they would have gotten moderate participation. But in this case, as part of your registration you had to actively leave that paragraph empty and click okay. As a result they got hundreds of best practices shared.
We also made a point of presenting the flag of where each person was from. I remember that there was one country dominating briefly, so suddenly other countries were posting to avoid being noticeably absent. You have to give something. back and get people excited.
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