The ROI on Social Media Monitoring
What started out as a means for people to connect socially online has turned out to be a useful business tool. How useful?
Check also out this Web 2.0 landscape, showing a great organization of production tools, user generated media and filters.
Businesses who market directly to consumers took an early lead in using social media to reach a broader audience, to listen to their customers and to strenghten their brands. And indeed, for B2B businesses, social media has now become an integral component of their multi-channel campaigns.
Research firm Aberdeen Group conducted a benchmarking project published in October 2009 (available here) that presented specific performance criteria used to measure the benefits of social media monitoring:
- Risk reduction. Think of social media monitoring as an early warning system, where attacks on a company's reputation through negative opinions, false rumours, information leaks, illegal distribution even, can be dealt with in a defensive and even preemptive manner. Being able to mitigate the damage caused to their brands is one of the most powerful benefits of social media monitoring.
- Customer advocacy. Customer recommendations are one of the most compelling outcomes of a company's efforts to consistently deliver excellence to their customers. The act of engaging with top influencers online, once they've been identified, will lead to an increased volume of word-of-mouth referrals. And since the network effect of word-of-mouth can deliver ever-increasing value at little or not incremental cost, it leads to icnreased revenues and increased profitability.
- Consumer insights generation. Traditional research methodologies probably won't be replaced all together by social media monitoring, but by obversing a universe of consumers who freely discuss their brand experiences as well as their wants and needs, companies can glean invaluable insights to be used in the development of strategic options, new products and services.
- Customer service cost reduction. A large proportion of the online conversations taking place are about help, how-to and support. There are vast public knowledge repositories consisting of question-and-answer pairs, and they can be used to alleviate demand for traditional customer support services. This means that for some companies, the starting point for building an effective ROI model for social media monitoring may lie in customer support and not marketing. Key to that ROI is to compare the call center and content development efforts and results to the online solve rate generated by users.
You need automated tools to efficiently monitor online conversations that affect your business. We can help you get started with Hubspot, which in addition to offering a comprehensive suite of social media tools also provides tools for SEO and inbound marketing.
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important of all, employees throughout your firm should understand their role in building good customer relations, so make your plans available to employees throughout your company. Once everyone understands how a CRM solution helps the company, makes their job easier and improves their performance, they'll buy into the strategy and will support its implementation.
Rather than documenting each department's requirements separately, invite all stakeholders to a joint session.
This joint session will go a long way towards building a common set of requirements and processes. Use our primer, How to Choose a CRM system, to put critical questions in front of the participants. Chances are, you'll foster a real understanding of the advantages of a common tool.
Why is this process so important?
This process offers a logical progression of steps that allows you to build support for what inevitably will be changes in processes. There will be a learning curve once the system is deployed, and we can't stress enough the need to put in sufficient training for all participants.
The end result should be a total understanding that all three departments are equally critical to the success of the project.
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