June 5, 2011 By 5 Comments
According to Extra Mile Research only 30% of marketers who conduct social media marketing have measurement and analysis strategy fully implemented. The biggest complaint that I hear from people trying to implement social media is that they spend more time “selling” the strategy internally than actually thinking about what they need to do and getting a budget to measure their initiatives.The worst thing that can happen to any interactive marketer is putting in a lot of effort to sell the organization on social media and then finally getting the thumbs up with a budget that limits the strategic plan. This guarantees failure and the resistance to say “see I told you so” The strategy should always drive the budget the budget should never limit the strategy and when the latter happens you usually have made a really bad first impression with consumers who gave you one chance and are not willing to give you a second chance.
One of the biggest issues with social media marketing is the use of analytics. It seems every day there is a new blog post about social mediasearch engine optimization or measurement tools but a tool is useless unless it’s in the hands of someone who knows how to use it. Anyone can provide you with a lot of data, but who within your organization is the lightening rod to leverage these analytics into actionable items that can help meet brand objectives ? Those are the people that are all too often missing because they have to be good marketers and understand how to read analytics to get the organization excited about new opportunities.
There are way too many analytic solutions out there and not enough people to analyze the data and turn it into actionable data. Online social media analytics can only provide you with quantified data at a time when people want to be heard as individuals. This means that you need someone who can read into the data and say “this is telling me…”. Vanity metrics such as Facebook Likes and number of Twitter followers are not going to help your brand if those consumers don’t become customers.
Marketers spend way too much time trying to justify what they want to do and by the time they get around to doing it they are tired because they have talked about it for so long that it seems old and tired. We need less time listening to social media experts and preparing Power Points and more time implementing.
Remember while your preparing Power Points to convince management that you need social media your competitors are leap frogging you and actually doing it.
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