Measurements
You cannot manage what you do not measure. Fortunately, Internet-based platforms provide a wealth of information and metrics in real time allowing you to obtain almost immediate feedback and to make adjustments early.
When considering the success of a Social Network Strategy, it is not just the number of page views or how many people have “click on” your company home page, but how engaged are they? The use of an “Engagement Index” that measures the breadth and the depth of your user’s experience with your business is an important management tool. You will want to see that your customers and prospects are not just passively consuming content but using the content to foster conversations and make connections, referring the content to friends and colleagues, giving feedback to other users, communicating… engaged.
Some sample metrics you want to gather are: # of customers, # of prospects, # of logins, # of page views, amount of new content added, page rankings, # of blog entries, # of click-throughs…. How are you going to measure these objectives? What can you measure that has meaning? This is where your choice of technology solutions becomes important. Your technology solution will ideally allow you to maintain a “dashboard” view of all your customers’, prospects’, members’ and champions’ activities. Wendistry and Blackbox Technologies are currently exploring and reviewing several technologies and will be making recommendations in future blog posts.
In addition to measuring the activity on your network, you will also want to keep your Social Marketing Strategy up to date by maintaining regular updates of:
- Customer profiles
- Prospect profiles
- Competitor and ally network profiles
- Alternative platform profiles
In conclusion, Social Marketing enables companies to provide dynamic new ways for businesses and their target audiences to communicate, collaborate and associate more freely and richly. The barriers of mass communication have fallen dramatically and with them, so have the barriers to entry for new competitors to your business.
Yet, these changes also provide amazing opportunities to master and apply these new tools… refreshing a company’s intellectual content, increase the level of conversation with the customer and extend the reach and impact of marketing to position the business for future growth and success.
Does YOUR business have a strategy for this new environment? If not, LET US KNOW.
About Wendi McGowan