In two of our previous postings, Bridging the Social Media Silo and Are you Blindly Optimizing Your Marketing, we discussed some common themes that emerged during our Alpha Qualification work.  Many companies align their marketing departments according to channel teams.  One team has responsibility for the website, another is charged with SEO/SEM and yet another has responsibility for print and/or broadcast.  In many organizations, a brand new team silo has been created to leverage social media. Each team is responsible for tracking and reporting on the performance of their designated area. 

It's easy to understand how this structure would make operational sense for a large organization. It makes for a very clear and concise organizational chart.  Yet, customers are rarely funneled down these discreet and carefully delineated paths.  The target's path is often blurred and meandering, crossing several marketing channels before arriving at "customer-hood".  All acknowledge this reality, yet measurement structures rarely reflect it.

The often-beleaguered CMO is then left to make sense of a channel measurement structure that compares apples to oranges and bares little resemblance to the customer reality.  How can marketing investments be effectively optimized with only a partial or misleading picture available?  Is it any wonder that these under-appreciated, Captains of Marketing have an average corporate life expectancy of 22.9 months?

So, how does a company develop a clearer picture of marketing's effect on the target?  How can companies determine which channels perform and which lag as the target zig-zags across them?  How can a company be certain that their marketing investment is optimized to turn targets into customers?

Social Media may hold the key.

In our recent posting, The World's Largest Source of Target Data, we spoke of Social Media as an incredible collection of data points:

Social Media is an almost limitless source of data about the habits, lifestyles, opinions, relationships and behaviors of an incredibly diverse pool of people . . . More than 100 million people have swelled the ranks of social media visitors in just two short years.  Today, the total pool of individuals stands at more than 300 million strong, roughly the equivalent of every man, woman and child in the United States.

With such a repository of data available and with the right tool, Social Media can become the measurement bridge between individual marketing channels.  When leveraged properly, data  from Social Media acts as an adhesive, binding individual channel performance into an accurate, holistic view.

Our methodology combines the detailed measurement and analysis of each individual marketing channel. . .

 . . . with data carefully gathered from Social Media to inform a series of Key Performance Indicators.  These KPIs span the entire marketing channel mix and provide decision-makers with a comprehensive and detailed view of a company's ability to attract, engage and retain customers.  Collectively, we refer to these KPIs as Social Intelligence:

In our next post, we'll define these KPIs in detail and provide examples of their use and organizational value (dare we say ROI Calculation). In the meantime, if you have any questions, please put them in the comments section and we'll respond as soon as we're able.

Photo by PatrickSmithPhotography

Wendy Troupe and I were speaking to Nathan Gilliatt this morning about the nature of analysis, measurement and social media.  The conversation ranged across a variety of topics: from his recent and very successful AnalyticsCamp in Chapel Hill to the occurrence measurement silos (we all agreed, by the way, that measurement silos stink and rob you of true cross-channel, big-picture insight).  During that conversation, Nathan said something that stopped the coffee cup halfway to my lips.  It was eloquent, simple and yet, profound:

"[If you set aside the corporate desire for engagement], Social Media becomes a set of really powerful, publicly-available, data points."  (paraphrasing, Nathan said it much better)

You can't measure what you can't see.  If your tools are limited to measuring volume of mention, share of conversation, +/- sentiment, degree of influence, etc there may be a lot you're not seeing.  In fact, if your current analytics tools aren't measuring the effect that your social media initiatives have on other communications channels, then you may be attempting marketing optimization while blindfolded.

2010 seems to be the year that everyone thinks corporations will advance beyond the often awkward and tumultuous stages of "Social Media Puberty" to the more focused stages of Social Media Maturity.  Twitter is rife with tweets on the subject.  Google's delivering 700,000 pages on the search term.  Social Media Blogging luminaries like Brian Solis, Marshall Sponder and MarketingProfs' Paul Williams are cogitating and writing about it.  In fact, MarketingSherpa recently made the 2010 Social Media Benchmark Report available, which detailed, among other things, the three phases of Social Media Maturity. 

We felt that MarketingSherpa didn't go quite far enough.  In our recent post titled, ROI Measurement: The Fourth Phase of Social Media Maturity, we added a new Phase of development.  This new Phase captured a company's evolution beyond the often siloed and isolated, strategic Listening Phase to a phase of social media maturity characterized by quantifying and correlating the performance and activity in one communications channel to the performance and activity of other/all channels. This phase not only makes social media ROI calculation possible but also makes things like advanced trend analysis, multi-spectrum sentiment analysis, and predictive modeling possible.

The chart below features our interpretation and embellishment Marketing Sherpa's three phases: