Aaron Urmacher over at Mashable put up a great post last week on crafting Social Media strategies: "How to Develop a Social Media Plan for your Business in 5 Steps"...definitely recommended reading.
In particular, I think there's a real need in the industry for more discussion on his last step, "Step 5: Measuring Success". Aaron offers some smart questions to ask and points to tools like Trendpedia for high-level insight, but measuring the impact of different types of Social Media initiatives at a program level can be difficult - for both clients and solution providers.
To that end, I recommend starting with framework that Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li put forth in Groundswell - which includes recognizing the different goals and success metrics of different types of "Groundswell" Community/Social Media efforts, and how they relate to traditional business functions. For example:
- Social Media efforts related to RESEARCH should focus on LISTENING to what customers have to say
- Social Media efforts related to MARKETING should focus on getting customers TALKING about you
- Social Media efforts related to SALES should focus on ENERGIZING people to buy
- Social Media efforts related to SUPPORT should focus on SUPPORTING customers with what they need
- Social Media efforts related to DEVELOPMENT should focus on EMBRACING customers in the design process
...and each of these should bring with them very different success metrics. Too often these days, we see companies apply (for example) MARKETING-related success metrics to an effort that was really about RESEARCH in the first place.
I did have the opporunity to see Josh Bernoff speak at the BazaarVoice Summit and was very impressed.
