The Journey's the Destination

There’s no standard ROI model that works across Social campaigns. Partly because objectives vary and partly because there’s usually more going on than just Social, and isolating the Social activity (and linking it to sales) isn’t easy.

When measurement is tied to sales… it’s best to use a promotion or something that makes the activity measureable in social channels. The RoI is based on money spent vs. promotional participation/purchases.

When RoI is tied to Media Value, we can compare reach numbers, which we get from the insights section of Facebook vs. standard media prices. In these cases we say… We got X amount of media for Y price, therefore saved Z.

When RoI is tied to awareness. We need to benchmark what the current level of awareness is. There are usually costs associated with benchmarking studies, which is one reason why we haven’t done awareness based RoI.

When RoI is tied to engagement. We look at clicks, likes, comments, posts reactions and anything else we can measure. Engagement is the easiest thing to measure in the Social space, but assigning it a value is where it gets tricky. We usually tell our clients how much engagement they got for a particular social communication and that is usually enough. Ideally, we should be assigning the engagement a value in order to input that value into an RoI model, but it’s difficult to predict engagement before launching a piece of comms without guessing. 

The RoI question is the holy grail of Social. A question we can only ask if we're sure of our objectives.

Here's a really interesting blog post on how the Facebook Newsfeed works, and how the new EdgeRank algorithm is changing what content appears http://brandsavant.com/attention-rationing/ 

In outline…

• The 'Top news' wall view only shows content based on what FB thinks you're interested in – based on past interaction – this is the EdgeRank algorithm
• Most people never switch to the real time 'Most recent' view which shows everything.
• This may cause people to be cautious about what they interact with, as they will learn that engaging in brand content will cause your Wall to fill up with stuff from that brand
• If you don't concentrate on producing the right content at the right frequency, it's best not to invest anything in Facebook at all, as the content will be invisible.

This is all further strong argument for consumer Passion Points driving Content Threads – and the consistent delivery thereof. Of which, more soon...

I was chatting with a colleague (Jason) last week about the qualities you need to excel in the different departments which make up a creative agency. When you distill down, its a mixture of brains, charm and crazy creativity.

It reminded me of this classic. Inspired, I worked up this...

So, where do you fit?

I recently came across a hugely insightful report from Forrester predicting how agency/client relationships will develop. The focus is on what they think agencies will need to offer in the future and advice on to clients on how to choose agency partners. They've invented 'Adaptive Marketing' as a term for how marketing has to shift from

• ‘Outbound’ to ‘Surround’
• Campaigns to Experiences
• Segments to Individuals

In many ways it describes where Chemistry is headed, which is great - my takeout is that the agency of the future is strong in three areas

• “Mad Men” big ideas
• digital and direct rigour
• social media propagation

If you’ve not seen it, you can get a copy here.

I’ve been fascinated watching what’s been happening in social media around the General Election. In the post “Rage Against the Machine for No 1” era (when a couple launched a Facebook campaign and knocked the default X-Factor Christmas single off the top spot), people understand that they can build a movement and many know how to do it (Forrester’s Groundswell research shows an increase in ‘Creator’ behavior – 24% of people create and upload content). 

Its effects are already visible in a number of ways.

For instance, I’m writing this 24 hours after Gordon Brown called life-long Labour voter Gillian Duffy a “bigoted woman”. And #bigotedwoman is massively trending on Twitter and there are new Facebook groups popping up – the chatter is loud and constant. The Labour machine is trying to move the agenda on, and what’s really interesting is that the opposition doesn’t really need to stoke the fires, as the voters are doing it themselves.

During the leaders’ debates there was a huge amount of real time discussion on Twitter (via the #leadersdebate hashtag), with Social TV type commentary, which made it seem like a sporting event. Searches for ‘Quango’, ‘Jobs Tax’ and ‘Trident’ peaked within 30 minutes of the broadcast showing that people were engaged and wanting to know more.

Jon Morter (The Rage Against the Machine instigator) has launched the ‘We got Rage Against the Machine to #1, we can get the Lib Dems into office!’ Facebook group and currently has 157,807 members. It’s an interesting thought, and with things so finely balanced, it could give the middle party enough scale to actually make a difference.

Groups of people and organisations are also producing useful applications to help voters navigate through the Parties’ impenetrable policies. For example Voteforpolicies (voteforpolicies.org.uk) has helped 203,534 people understand which party has which policy, pushing the charisma of party spokesmen into the background. 10 Downing Tweets (www.10downingtweets.co.uk) aggregates Tweets of the parties and leaders and presents them in real time, with some trend statistics to show how sentiment is shifting.

The parties have also (of course) been jumping on the social media bandwagon too, Tweets a plenty. They’re adding to the noise with a suite of entertain-and-share content ranging from the Labservative from the Liberals, the CameronGirls rapping for the Tories on their YouTube channel and even the Greens with their personalised policy videos. Some of the leaders are on the scene too, Nick Clegg having exceeded his Friends quota on Facebook now has 49,695 fans – not quite on a par with Barak Obama’s 8.2 million – but 18,000 more than David Cameron. Gordon Brown seems not to have bothered.

And so in some ways, most appropriately, it’s Gordon Brown who’s the subject of a charming social happening-come-flashmob. ‘Gordon Brown's Leaving Pressie’ is a Facebook group dedicated to ideas for what to give him at his leaving do, which they’ll host at The Red Lion opposite Downing Street on May 7^th.