HOW TO SET GOALS FOR YOUR SOCIAL-MEDIA PROGRAM

 

HOW TO SET GOALS FOR YOUR SOCIAL-MEDIA PROGRAM 

 For most everything they do, marketers have a particular goal enshrined 

as the driving purpose of their campaigns, the key metric to be tracked for 

purposes of measuring return-on-investment. For direct-response cam-

paigns, the metric will be sales or qualifi ed sales leads. For PR people, the 

key stats will be media mentions, reach, or impressions, and perhaps the 

paid-ad cost equivalent of free ink. Brand marketers will measure their 

impact by tracking market share, brand recognition, and brand attitudes. 

 But pity the poor social-media manager. She can rightly expect her 

efforts to pay off in any and all of those areas, but unpredictably, fl eetingly, 

and probably without leaving clear footprints. 

 And yet while most organizations are happy to indulge in some explor-

atory tire-kicking of a new frontier like social media, before any serious 

investment of time and money is made, top management will expect there to 

be some tangible goals and measurement of progress toward those goals. 

 As Dale Nitschke, former president of Target.com , puts it, “You cannot 

move resources to this new channel unless you can measure some of the 

results. 

Let me say right away that too shortsighted a focus on metrics—or too 

ambitious a goal—will doom a promising social-media program to a pre-

mature death. Just because you won ’ t vacuum up as much revenue as Dell 

doesn ’ t mean it ’ s not worth doing. What ’ s the value of being where your 

most Web-savvy and interconnected customers are? What ’ s the value of 

listening to what matters to them, of interacting with them directly and 

being a part of their online social circle? “Initially, it ’ s very qualitative,” 

points out Best Buy ’ s Mark Mosiniak. “Does it mean something to the 

customer? That ’ s very hard to measure.

What Metrics to Watch 

 You can track key performance metrics yourself through your analytics 

package, and you can augment your own tracking by enlisting specialized 

social-media tools like Trendrr, TruCast, Radian6, or any of the several 

others cropping up daily. 

 Most external social-media tracking tools focus mainly on sentiment 

tracking—what ’ s being said about your brand. They may employ spider-

ing and screen-scraping technologies to fi nd references to your brand or 

products, or those of specifi ed competitors, across the blogosphere and 

social mediascape. These services are not unlike Google Alerts, which fi nd 

references to your keywords in news releases, but they typically overlay 

trending over time, charting options, and other tools. 

 But don ’ t overthink things, either. The simplest approach may just be to 

issue unique discount or promotion codes any time you promote offers on 

a social network. “If you have a specifi c promo code you use on Facebook 

and Twitter, that ’ s the simplest form of tracking.” 

 Here are touchpoints on your Web site to watch: 

• Visits from social-media sites 

• Leads, inquiries, and catalog requests from social-media sites 

• Newsletter signups from social-media sites 

• Orders and revenue from social-media sites 

 Note: since these stats measure what someone does on your site after 

visiting your site, use caution, and remember that “correlation does not 

prove causation.” Many people may bop back and forth from your e-com-

merce site to your blog to your Facebook page and back again before mak-

ing a purchase. Don ’ t be too quick to say “Ha! Facebook caused a sale!” If 

you ’ re not doing multichannel tracking, you ’ ll never know. 

customer really came in the door in response to your trusty direct-mail 

catalog.

 Other metrics track your social networks and your impact on the blogo-

sphere, Twittersphere, and the Web at large: 

• On Facebook fan pages, Page Insights is a section page authors can track 

that measures post quality; the post quality rating is a measure of the 

percentage of users that have interacted with your page (“liking,” com-

menting, etc.). The star rating shows how your level of interaction com-

pares your page with others with similar-sized fan bases. 

• Track fans, followers, connections, or other measures of your network 

size. It ’ s easy and provides a useful indicator of your footprint on social 

media—but I wouldn ’ t read much into the data. 

• Track mentions of your brand name and key products using Google 

Alerts, Tweetmeme, and other social-media “listening” tools. 

Social-Media Command Center 

 What you watch is important. But until I learned about Gatorade ’ s 

social-media “Mission Control” room, I didn ’ t realize how important it is 

how you watch . 

 Gatorade Mission Control is a slick, glass-walled room glowing with 

the light of six huge, wall-mounted monitors. Other monitors and worksta-

tions cover a single curved desk, where as many as fi ve marketing staffers 

keep their eyes glued to Gatorade ’ s place in the social-media conversation, 

in real-time. One monitor charts tweets referencing the Gatorade brand 

and trending topics. Another shows several line charts tracking blog men-

tions of Gatorade as well as three rival brands. 

 The displays, custom designed for Gatorade parent company PepsiCo 

by IBM and Radian6, are visually impressive. But are they helping the 

company manage? 

 Gatorade ’ s Carla Hassan, senior marketing director for consumer and 

shopper engagement, answers an emphatic yes. 3

 For instance, in monitor-

ing responses to its Gatorade Has Evolved campaign, Mission Control 

quickly saw heavy social-media buzz developing around a song by rap art-

ist David Banner. Within 24 hours, the company had worked with Banner 

to release a full-length version of the song and distribute it to Gatorade 

followers and fans on Twitter and Facebook. 

 Gatorade ’ s tools are being used to tailor Web sites and landing pages to its 

top-performing topics and videos, based on social-media conversations. As

reduced its landing-page exit rate from 25 percent to 9 percent. 

 I ’ d also suggest that merely establishing a command center highlights 

the importance of social media within a business—making it more fun, 

more engrossing, and more likely to percolate into the culture of the com-

pany as a whole. 

 Hassan says the goal of Mission Control is to “take the largest sports brand 

in the world and turn it into the largest participatory brand in the world.” 

 To that end, Gatorade isn ’ t just monitoring the conversation, but partici-

pating in it as well. The company hosts events on Ustream and Facebook in 

which a sports nutritionist answers questions from fans. During the 2010 

Super Bowl, Gatorade invited fans to interact with some of its NFL stars 

through Ustream as they tested the new Gatorade G Series Pro drink. 

 If successful, the Mission Control strategy is likely to spread to other busi-

nesses within PepsiCo, according to Bonin Bough, director of global social 

media at the company. “We believe what we ’ re building here is an example 

of a sandbox of tools and processes we can use across the organization.” 

 To get a glimpse of the social-media command center in action, go to 

YouTube and search “Gatorade Mission Control.” 

WRITING A SOCIAL-MEDIA BUSINESS PLAN 

 You ’ ve already spent a lot of time on social media at this point, and 

now you ’ re getting ready to spend more money. What exactly are you 

going to achieve by being active in social media? And how are you going 

to achieve it? 

 Just as you would write a business plan for a new entrepreneurial ven-

ture, or craft a marketing plan for a major new product or category launch, 

you now need to write your social-media business plan. 

 You ’ re not trying to qualify for a bank loan, so don ’ t knock yourself out. 

Take the exercise seriously, but try to keep the document to fi ve to 10 

pages. The purpose of planning is fourfold: 

• Force yourself to think broadly and take the long view about your proj-

ect and its objectives. 

• Create a roadmap to follow with tangible goals. 

• Sell the project internally to whoever must approve funding. 

• Give yourself a framework to return to and revise as the project goes 

along.

The key ingredients for a good social-media business plan: 

Executive summary : Summarize why participating in social media is so 

important to your company, what your broad strategy is, and what goals you ’ ll 

achieve. 

Mission statement : Restate the company ’ s mission in light of the unique 

opportunities and nature of social media. 

Competitive and market analysis : Since about 80 percent of the online 

public is using social media, calculating the size of the market is a waste 

of time, although impressive. 

The 

main question: What are your chief 

rivals already doing on the social-media networks? How many fans and 

followers do they have, what campaigns are they running, are they driving 

PR, revenue, search traffi c, etc.? 

Marketing plan : Describe what platforms you ’ ll participate in right 

away, and show a rough time line for expansion into new platforms and 

opportunities.

Operations plan : Show how you ’ ll staff the effort and what the team ’ s 

responsibilities and deliverables will be. Describe your posting frequency, 

customer-service approach (CRM), and brief rules of engagement. Address 

how you ’ ll put safeguards in place so that social media won ’ t be a source 

of legal or brand-image problems. This is also the place to mention soft-

ware, consultants, domain names, and other things you ’ ll need to buy. 

Goals and objectives : Unlike a typical business plan, whose upside is 

forecast in the fi nancials, your social-media business plan will need to describe 

a number of important and quantifi able goals that are nonmonetary. See the 

section above on analytics for ideas. Project the number of new e-mail sign-

ups and calculate their value, do the same for fans and followers, or external 

links for search-engine value, dollars trackable to social-media campaigns, 

PR placements, or brand mentions. Try to separate the goals of outreach (to 

prospects and the media) from the goals of loyalty and retention (of existing 

customers). A good social-media program will yield fruit in both regards. 

Financials : These will be fairly simple. You ’ ll need to have budget num-

bers on the expense side and some quantifi able goals—that may or may 

not include sales—on the ROI side. Charts forecasting traffi c, fans, media 

mentions, or revenue are helpful tools both to sell the concept.