Measurement & Reporting: How much budget should I allocate?

It’s a logical question. One that many marketers are thinking more deeply about these days, and for good reason. The expectation is that marketing and advertising should be more accountable. With more sophisticated marketing measurement tools and increased digital spend, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to quantify the results of your marketing investments.

However unlike other more established business disciplines, marketing and advertising measurement best practices are still being formed. So how do you determine how much budget to allocate to the measurement of your programs?

How much is “normal” to invest in measurement and reporting?

In my research I’ve seen everything from 2% - 20% of your overall budget recommended, but to really understand what this relates to you need to be specific about what is included in the figure.

So it depends, and there is no perfect answer or clear best practice as of yet. However, there are various perspectives and guidance that can be analyzed to develop a reasonable approach.

For starters, you need a minimum level of spend to think in terms of a percentage allocation. For example 5% of a $1 million dollar media budget makes sense, whereas 5% of a $25K asset development budget might not get you very far, or at least would provide only rudimentary metrics.

Ultimately though you should never think of measurement as an optional nice to have. You should always establish key performance metrics and have a method to track the success of your programs, whether it’s manual of via a more sophisticated tool or system.

As such, tasks such as initial set-up and configuration of measurement systems should likely be treated as a separate type of cost. This would be distinct from the dollars you will invest in measurement of ongoing performance, for providing regular reporting and generating optimization recommendations to test.

To provide perspective from what others think on the subject of budget allocation for marketing and advertising measurement, I’ve aggregated reviewed examples of the best thinking that I could find publically available online.

Jim Sterne a well-respected expert in the field of web analytics takes a firm stance and argues that 20% of your marketing budget should be allocated towards measurement. His view is more holistic and includes both measurement and optimization. You can read more of his thoughts here: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2026285/investment-measurement

Keith Dawson of The CMO Site launched a simple online poll to ask: “what percentage of your marketing budget is devoted to analytics?” Here are the responses thus far:

Image Source: http://www.thecmosite.com/author.asp?section_id=1200&doc_id=205085

A quick analysis of the results shows that the most common answer is less than 5%, certainly a far distance from Jim’s 20%. However a key difference here is that Jim has made a recommendation on what to allocate, whereas those responding to Keith’s poll in theory are reporting what they do currently spend.

My simple recommendation would be to start with 5% of your project budget devoted to measurement and reporting. Treat system configuration and measurement tools set-up as a separate cost. Also begin by reserving 10% for optimization.

For additional perspective on measurement budget allocation here’s a list of articles and whitepapers to get you started:

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2026285/investment-measurement
http://www.thecmosite.com/author.asp?section_id=1200&doc_id=205085
http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/B2B_Content_Marketing_2012.pdf
http://www.ragan.com/Main/Articles/6_ways_to_determine_your_PR_measurement_budget_43450.aspx
http://www.omniture.com/offer/357
http://www.marketo.com/library/definitive-guide-to-marketing-metrics-marketing-analytics.pdf

Social Media Strategy Fundamentals, Social Business and the Digital Agency Client Relationship

The Transformation to Social Business
Social media has become an integral component of the modern marketing mix. And social as a channel for communication, innovation and customer service has the opportunity to transform how brands conduct business.

However, the concept of “social” and what it offers for business growth, innovation and customer relationships is far bigger than simply “social media”. Social media is simply part of a larger transformation happening in business today. When building the right social strategy for your brand, consider what social business might enable for your organization.

To leverage the opportunities afforded by social business transformation, brands need to recognize that: 

• Social properties are part of a connected digital eco-system and cannot be treated as isolated islands; customers expect an integrated experience. 
• Customers are more than ever in discovery mode and content distributed through social channels empowers the customer discovery journey. 
• Social technologies enable brands to uncover powerful customer insights not available through other research methods. 
• Social media will only amplify the truth about a bad product or service. Make sure you build great products and services first, then amplify them through social. 
• Innovation around products and services can come from anywhere. Employees, customers, partners AND those responsible for product development. Social technologies often enable innovation at greater speed. 
• To realize the most value from social engagement, brands must be present in and listen to online dialogue on a consistent basis. 

In order to build momentum and acceptance with your social business agenda, it’s best to take a pragmatic approach to social media. With respect to managing ongoing programs, evaluate your needs based on the stage of sophistication of your social initiatives.

For example, listening on a consistent basis for conversation around your brand and products is a fundamental building block. Beyond this, evaluate your programs based on your social mix. 

• Are you managing a presence on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube?
• Maintaining a corporate blog?
• Running a brand-sponsored community?
• Have you created relationships with bloggers or other online influencers?
• Do you have an internal social community to connect employees and drive business innovation?
• What else is part of your social mix?

From an agency perspective I’ve supported clients in many ways, including being the voice of the brand on external social properties, acting as the eyes and ears to regularly listen for opportunities and threats. At a certain point of program growth though it makes sense for brands to have a dedicated employee or more to support the continued nurturing and growth of social programs, along with your agency partner.

On a very practical level, when an agency is engaged in supporting a client with social programs, regular and frequent communication between agency and client-side teams is important to being as proactive and responsive as possible.


Social Media Plans and Deliverables

Let’s start by acknowledging that there are different levels of plan depending on your situation and business needs. For example, a holistic social media plan would encompass a wide range of properties, tactics, campaigns, programs, integration points, measurement criteria and so forth. An outline for a holistic social media plan might look like this: 

1. Objectives 
2. Social Channel Mix 
3. Foundational Programs 
4. Measurement Approach 
5. Immediate Action Plan 
6. Short-Term Action Plan (next 3-6 months) 
7. Longer-Term Action Plan (Next 6-12+ months) 
8. Appendix 

Whereas a social media plan for a specific advertising campaign or even for a presence on a specific property such as Facebook or Twitter would be more focused in its substance. That said, broadly speaking there are 12 important questions to consider when developing a social media plan, the answers to which will provide the inputs for the substance or your plan, they are: 

1. What’s our strategic vision and business goals for social? 
2. What does integrating social mean for our organization? 
3. From a marketing and operations perspective where does social fit? 
4. What are realistic objectives to pursue? 
5. What's our social channel mix? 
6. What role does each social channel serve and what's our approach to each? 
7. How will we measure success? 
8. What content should we invest in? 
9. What else should we invest in? 
10. How do we get people to share? 
11. What's the 90-day plan? 
12. What's next on the 12-month horizon? 

Example Social Media Strategy Approach
As a caveat, any recommended strategy should be based on research-driven customer insights, the outcome of collaboration between agency and client teams and competitive analysis, but sometimes you’re missing that, so here’s a straw man you can use as a start.

Let’s use the following criteria to think through developing a social media plan:

Objectives
“Sales growth through transactions at retail locations, both corporate and franchise stores, as the primary objectives, followed by brand awareness and affinity as secondary.”

Program Approach
One might consider the following elements as foundational building blocks for a social media strategy and set of initial tactics:

1. Shared vision amongst the executive team regarding the role of social for the brand and realistic understanding of the timeframes required to achieve results. 
2. Online community manager regularly monitoring brand properties and online conversation, multiple times per week. 
3. Using a professional grade listen tool to monitor conversation across blogs, forums, Twitter, online communities, Facebook, YouTube, etc. 
4. Signage at retail locations promoting the value and benefits of participation with the brand’s social properties. 
5. A presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. 
6. A corporate blog. 

Beyond these foundational elements, as a first pass at relevant programs to pursue, you could consider the following tactical program elements: 

1. Seasonal campaigns and contests. 
2. Real-world events that are amplified through social broadcasting. 
3. Social advertising leveraging interest graph targeting. 
4. Invite-only customer product innovation community. 
5. Mobile check-in rewards program. 

With respect to evaluation criteria, for any program there will be both marketing metrics and business performance metrics. For example:

Marketing Metrics may include:

• Participation rate 
• Social reach 
• Amplification rate 
• Total program participants 
• Fan growth rate during and after program compared to baseline 
• New versus existing customers 

Business Metrics may include:

• Net new customers 
• Total sales 
• Incremental sales 
• Incremental profit 
• ROI 

How to approach integration across consumer marketing, customer service and corporate communications departments

It all starts with open communication and a culture of collaboration. If your organization is highly siloed and departments are used to protecting their turf, and therefore not sharing, these behaviors need to be addressed before you can effectively integrate departments for the purpose of a coordinated social strategy.

Assuming you have established a culture of collaboration and there is support from the executive level for pursuing a social business agenda, it often comes down to clearly establishing roles and responsibilities, appending those to existing job functions, providing incentive to share and collaborate rather than rewarding the hoarding of knowledge and information.

In addition to behaviors and acknowledged job responsibilities, there are tools that can help to coordinate participation by the right people in the right conversations. Many listening tools on the market today offer a social CRM and/ or engagement management set of features for routing, responding and tracking brand engagements with customers. It’s still important to remember though that the technology will not solve behavior problems. The right behaviors must be established, acknowledged and rewarded before you can benefit from process automation tools.


Content, Community and Influencer Outreach (Social PR)

Content and social media
Content is the lifeblood of social media and inbound marketing. If you are not willing to invest in the creation of original content, the repurposing of existing content, the curation of quality content and the intelligent distribution and publishing of content, then you’re missing a fundamental part of the equation for social media success. Content - quality, contextually relevant, timely content – is critical to the success of your social media programs. Plan for it.


FTC guidelines and how they impact influencer outreach programs
The FTC guidelines are common sense. They are not new rather they have simply been updated to incorporate guidance for social media since it did not exist when the guidelines were originally developed. So if you’re an honest, responsible marketer and advertiser who sells good products and services then the FTC guidelines should be nothing new or scary to you. On the other hand, if you’re a marketer and advertiser that has trouble with transparency, is trying to hide defects in your products and overall OK with being in the gray zone with communication, then you might have problems with the FTC guidelines.

With respect to influencer outreach programs, you as the brand are ultimately responsible for the legality of claims that your brand-supported influencers make on their blogs, in their tweets, on your Facebook page or anywhere else online. As such, the simple truth is that if you are planning to leverage and benefit from the voices of influencers that you have some known relationship with, you need to have clear policies that they agree to AND you as the brand must dedicate resources to tracking and managing what your influencers publish.

So in terms of the impact of the FTC guidelines on influencer outreach programs, the impact is that you as the brand need clear policies and you must dedicate resources to tracking and managing the programs. You simply cannot put an influencer outreach program on autopilot, you must remain involved to oversee and manage it.


Defining and determining “influence”
First off let’s start with the understanding that influence is a relative measurement. You must always ask yourself, influence relative to what?

Online influence and the ability to identify relevant online influencers for a brand, product or service is not only a hot topic in marketing today but also a field of measurement that is rapidly evolving as we continue to learn more. With the ability to observe connections between people and uncover individuals whose opinion matters within different spheres of conversation, services like Klout and Kred are giving marketers more sophisticated tools for analysis and interpretation of the ever-evolving social media landscape.

With this perspective, here’s a framework to evaluate and measure influence by three criteria: 

1. Topical: where someone has influence in a topic of content or expertise 
2. Temporal: where someone has influence within a defined span of time 
3. Identity-based: where there is life-style association and affinity amongst the audience and influencer 

As influence measurement tools become more sophisticated and accurate there will undoubtedly be new ways we’ll seek to quantify and quality influence that matters to a given brand.


Identifying influencers within various social media channels
Identifying influencers within social channels begins with defining a clear vision for the attributes of the people a brand is seeking as well as the actions the brand desires for the influencers to take on behalf of the brand.

With this, working with influencers is not simply a function of mathematical calculation, looking at whose numbers are best. Rather it’s a process of relationship building. And relationship building starts with getting to know people. If it’s Twitter then you may look at the subject matter a person is tweeting about, their follower to following ratio, the frequency of their publishing and also look at tools like Klout and Kred to get a directional sense for social reach and such.

In all cases look for people who have a contextually relevant audience of audiences that are associated with them through their social graph.

With respect to other social channels such as Facebook, YouTube, blogs, online communities and such, each channels has its nuances with respect to the granular data points that are evaluated, but the common thread is that you’re looking for people with an audience engaged with an influencer around topics relevant to the brand.


Outreach process for communicating with identified online influencers
Outreach begins with getting to know potential influencers through familiarity with their content. This means reading blog posts, Facebook updates, Tweets, forum entries, watching YouTube videos and so forth. Before approaching an influencer, you need to understand their perspective and be familiar with their content. This way you can be as relevant to them as possible. It’s important to keep in mind that there’s a value exchange that needs to take place when a person, identified as an influencer, agrees to act on behalf of a brand.

Once you have context and an angle to reach out, use channels such as email and phone as a primary means of contact but also use Twitter, blog comments and even a hand written note to make initial contact with people. Tailor ongoing communication with influencers by the level of participation in the influencer program.


Integrating influencer outreach with traditional communications and/or marketing campaigns
From a strategy perspective integrate influencer outreach with traditional communications and/ or marketing campaigns by using influencer content to engage people at points of interaction such as on landing pages, emails, integrated within online ad units and print communications.

Fundamentally it’s about finding ways to elevate the voice of real people to connect with others around the brand, it’s products and values. In addition coordinating real world events with online influencers can often be a great way to generate more online content and buzz. This includes contests with rewards for social sharing activity connected to your various key influencers.


Nurturing your relationships with influencers once an initiative is completed
Depending on the expectations you’ve established and what brand value exists for continuing to be involved with a given influencer, how you continue to invest in a program or individual will vary. Different influencers will impact your results but only once your program is underway can you see what’s really happening. Given this your initial plan may need to be fluid and change relative to different influencers. This will dictate whether you wind down or crank up a given influencer relationship per your original plan.


Content versus context
Great content, provided out of context will never be as successful as great content provided in context. It’s simply not one or the other; they are both extremely important in today’s world where there is often a high level of noise to filter out before we get to what we are seeking.

The key for brands is to figure out how to be contextually relevant and match the right content to the opportunity for interaction with the brand.

Given that as consumers and business people we are often online in a discovery mode, and it is content that we are ultimately seeking, the right context often leads us to the right content.

So in brief summary, make sure you’re building great content, that’s your entry ticket to the game. Work diligently to identify points of interaction where your content will be contextually relevant to a person. Continue to test and refine your contextual placements and content over time. And assume that continuous optimization is the new norm.

Social Business, it's time to digitally transform your brand

When one of the biggest global management consulting firms decides to build a social business consulting practice, you know that big business is taking notice and asking for help. In a recent blog post Mark Fidelman profiles how CapGemini is making the move to help its customers figure out their social business strategy, very interesting I think.

Social business is far more than social media. Even using the term "social" in this context seems to trivialize what is a radical transformation in the midst where corporations and businesses of all sizes, in all industries, are finding innovative ways to leverage social technologies to foster innovation, deepen relationships with customers and connect employees in new, more meaningful and efficient ways.

As we enter 2012 and beyond it will be fascinating to watch which brands get it and which ones do not. Those that fail to evolve and adopt a real social business strategy will likely not survive in the long-run as customers will defect to brands that truly listen AND act. And employees also gravitate towards careers with businesses that empower them through the social technologies they have in place; allowing for accelerated career and idea advancement without the more traditional structures of power and control that still exist today.

You can read more about this in the full report from MIT and CapGemi, Digital Transformation: A Roadmap for Billion-Dollar Organizations.

Measuring Content Engagement with Share of Choice

So I've been working on and refining my perspective around social media measurement for the past five years and I feel that I've been exposed to or heard the vast majority of ideas around metrics. Recently though while at Pivot I heard something new that stuck with me. The concept is "share of choice".

Whereas "share of voice" is a competitive metric I've been measuring for years, "share of choice" is a nice twist and meaningful competitive metric. It offers a new way to move beyond comparing conversation volume and to evaluate the important area of content engagement. While you want people to talk about your brand and products online, what you really want them to do is take action and demonstrate preference as well.

To make this distinction more clear, share of choice can be understood and defined as how often your brand is chosen to be engaged with versus your competitive set. As compared to share of voice, which evaluates the relative volume of conversation around your brand or products versus that of your competitors. I like how share of choice offers a view into understanding brand preference through people's direct actions of literally choosing to click on and view your video content.

With the increasing use and consumption of online video, I believe that determining how often your content is chosen versus that of your competitors is not only a relevant information point but can sincerely help you evaluate how well your content is resonating with your target audience, and in cases where it's not, enable you to learn from what your competition is doing well.

Online Influence and The Nuances of Measurement

Online Influence and the ability to identify relevant online influencers for a brand, product or service is not only a hot topic in marketing today but also a field of measurement that is rapidly evolving as we continue to learn more. With the ability to observe connections between people and uncover individuals whose opinion matters within different spheres of conversation, services like Klout and Kred are giving marketers more sophisticated tools for analysis and interpretation of the ever-evolving social media landscape.

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Pivot Conference in New York city; an event focused on the connected consumer and how this new breed of customer is having a sincere impact on the ways that brands market, communicate and build trusted relationships. There were many fascinating sessions and topics discussed at Pivot. For me one of the more interesting was a panel led by David Armano discussing online influence. The panel included Joe Fernandez, CEO and Founder of Klout, Larry Levy, Co-founder and CEO of Appinions, Elisa Camahort Page, Co-founder and COO of BlogHer; essentially people who should be quite well versed in the theory and practice of influence and influencer identification.

While I've personally been working on influencer programs and discussing with clients all the various attributes that constitute influence, I think the panel did a great job of distilling online influence into a few logical categories that made a lot of sense to me. They broke the forms of influence into the following schema:

1.) Topical: where someone has influence in a topic of content or expertise
2.) Temporal: where someone has influence within a defined span of time
3.) Identity-based: where there is life-style association and affinity amongst the audience and influencer

While there were certainly other nuanced definitions and sub-categories discussed such at likeness, experience and expertise, these three seemed to bring clarity to how you should be thinking about the influencers you might be looking for.

The Social Media Marketing Plan: 12 Critical Questions for Planners

Originally published on The New Group blog on 10.1.11

Faced with the request to create a social media marketing plan for your organization?

Crafting a defensible social media marketing plan can be time-consuming and even frustrating if you don't have a good framework to build your social media plan around. By considering the right questions up front you'll set yourself up for success.

The following 12 questions are helpful to consider when creating your social media marketing plan. Thoughtfully answer these questions before you jump in and start posting content, engaging with customers and orchestrating conversations around your brand.

1. What are our strategic vision and business goals for social?
2. What does integrating social mean for our organization?
3. From a marketing and operations perspective where does social fit?
4. What are realistic objectives to pursue?
5. What's our social channel mix?
6. What role does each social channel serve and what's our approach to each?
7. How will we measure success?
8. What content should we invest in?
9. What else should we invest in?
10. How do we get people to share?
11. What's the 90-day plan?
12. What's next on the 12-month horizon?

By taking a methodical and analytical approach you'll be prepared to measure social media marketing tactics and analyze results, learn what really works for your business and ultimately understand the relationship of social marketing programs to your business objectives. However, having consensus on the right social media strategy for your brand is critical to making smart decisions as you gain momentum and grow your social media programs. Plan accordingly and get your internal and external stakeholders on board before just doing something for the sake of doing something.

An additional concept also worth considering is the bigger-picture opportunity that developing a social media marketing plan brings up. What I mean is the bigger picture of social business and what else you should be considering beyond just social media marketing.

Think about what it means to integrate social into the way your brand conducts business. Consider what this means, for example, in the context of driving real business innovation and connecting people globally to harness the collective intelligence of your organization. Social can play an important role.

Social Branding: Is Social Marketing Right for My Brand?

This post was originally conceived and written by Derek Phillips when we worked together at The New Group. I subsequently edited some of the content. Derek is a seasoned content strategist whose opinions and work I highly respect. Derek is currently a Content Director at Critical Mass.

Originally published on The New Group blog.

Social branding: Is social marketing right for my brand? It's an important question. Fundamentally I believe there is opportunity for all brands to leverage social marketing, but it all depends on how broad your perspective is.

Many brands today think of social marketing as simply Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Others understand the power of monitoring and nurturing conversations in public online forums, and even fewer are yet to tap into the power of private online communities to spur innovation around their products, marketing and business model. The point here is that social marketing and social media are much bigger than just "likes" and "retweets." While those are aspects of social marketing, the bigger conversation is about social business and how to leverage social channels, technologies and human behaviors to build better, more responsive and ultimately more profitable brands.

As digital marketing strategists we're often asked how we can prove ROI on social marketing investments. Honestly there are a variety of answers to that question, but it often helps to consider other parallel investments that you probably already budget for today. Ask yourself what ROI metrics you and other companies apply to public relations, customer service, customer insights research and business innovation.

Too often people see social media as simply a marketing channel where the point is to gather as many "brand ambassadors" or "evangelists" as you can and the measure of success is how many people have liked your brand page on Facebook. While it's true that some brands can motivate legions of fans on their behalf, that's not necessarily true of all brands and misses huge opportunities that the social space offers outside of messaging and promotions. Below are some further thoughts on how you might think about social media as it relates to areas of your brand that you likely already invest in today.

Social Branding Through Public Relations
It used to be that companies hired PR professionals because those people had access to and relationships with the gatekeepers of media, thus providing access to audiences. While the value and need for PR professionals remains, the way these professionals do their jobs has changed and it's something we can all learn from.

1. Access to audiences is no longer gated by mass media (which doesn't mean that mass media doesn't have its place—it does, it's just not the ONLY way to access audiences).
2. Conversations about your brand are happening now and you can learn from them even if you decide not to engage.
3. It's easier to put out a small, smoldering fire than a raging blaze.

Even if it doesn't make sense (either from a legal or an organizational politics perspective) to directly engage users who speak ill of your brand, wouldn't you like to know what negative messages are resonating with real customers so you can prepare and take action before it becomes a much larger and more complicated issue?

Social Branding as Social Customer Service
One of the most overlooked opportunities in social marketing is what some are calling SCRM or Social Customer Relationship Management. In its simplest form it's applying a social layer to standard CRM practices and has value across each of the three phases of traditional CRM:

1. Acquire
2. Enhance
3. Retain

Acquisition can be achieved through a variety of social marketing promotions that encourage people to engage with your brand and are propelled by leveraging their social networks. We've all seen those campaigns:

* "Retweet this for a chance to win!"
* "Like our page and get 10% off your next purchase!"
* "The foursquare mayor of this establishment gets a free dessert with every meal!"

Enhancement can include access to exclusive content and events or direct interaction with people of interest. TV shows have leveraged these opportunities to keep viewers engaged beyond the 30- or 60-minute timeslot. From online chats ("Real Time with Bill Maher") to deleted scenes ("The Office") to extended interviews ("The Daily Show"), there are countless opportunities for creative brands to keep that audience engaged…and it's not just media companies.

The true genius of the notorious Old Spice campaign is that it took a TV commercial character who was resonating with fans and extended the campaign to a social sphere where those fans could directly interact with the character—and spread word of the campaign as a result. The millions of dollars in earned media are still being tallied.

Customer retention is a challenge for most companies, and a costly one at that. Most people, even the loudest and most obnoxious among us, just want to be heard. We want to feel good about our purchases and be acknowledged when we have issues. Social media allows savvy brands the opportunity to not only address the person who is directly affected, but show others that you're doing it. Most customer service complaints are related to common issues (that's why so many companies employ scripts). Address once and resolve for many. Even if you can't come to an immediate resolution, the fact that you're engaging and treating your customers with respect has resonating value.

Customer Insights from Social Brand Building
There are enormous opportunities to gather customer insights via social channels. The short story is that people are out there talking about your brands and your products and you can listen in to find out what they really think about your latest ad campaign or how they're actually using your products. Customers can be very clever in discovering new uses for products, and understanding that can lead to optimizing how you market and enhance those products.

Social Branding Through Business Innovation
An area that forward-looking social brands have already benefitted from is using social technologies to connect global internal teams as well as connect marketers and product developers with passionate customers to decrease time to market and unearth new directions to pursue.

This is a meaty topic deserving of a dedicated blog post, but for now let me just say that building internal social communities to connect employees around ideas and to connect customers with the people shaping your products is an area that many brands could benefit from.

So is it appropriate for all brands to have social outreach and engagement programs? No, probably not, but that doesn't mean there aren't real opportunities in social marketing, and the ROI on those activities can be substantial.