I had a brilliant Business Strategy lecturer at Greenwich Uni.  He used to stride up and down the lecture hall booming: “PROFIT... IS NOT A DIRTY WORD!”  And this is what I’m being reminded of as I digest a veritable feast of online pieces, blogs, webinars, Plurkshops, discussion groups and the such about social media measurement.

Here at the Metrica ranch, we’re running a PR campaign that involves both social and traditional media aspects.  It seems when we get a mainstream piece out there (say, in The Independent) a good few direct calls come off the back of it.  When we interact with online communities, however, nothing seems to happen.  Or does it?

At the latest Plurkshop, David Alston of Radian6 plurked on about how social media is a long term strategy.  Damn right it is; but do you know why?  It’s because you need a load of past social media conversations out and about for people to Google and judge whether they ultimately want to interact with your business.  And that’s the beauty of social media conversations; they are pretty much there forever.  Which is great when consumer decision making is sporadic, and you need to reach a global audience.

There are ongoing (and going, and going…) discussions about the ROI of social media.  Social media measurement will need to jump the same hoops that traditional media did to tie results to the bottom line.  It seems people want to go over the same ponderings PR measurement firms like Metrica did all those years ago… how do we isolate the PR effect?  What about the other marketing tactics?  What about the seasonality etc etc?  This is where econometrics comes in and will always be needed.  We just have another piece of PR data to tie into the marketing model and assess why people are buying things.

I’ve also seen folks making up wooly metrics around social media (see aforementioned Plurkshop) that still are only outputs, with fancier hats.  Outcomes will always be king and social media just needs to join the party to help us figure out what is driving those outcomes, be it changes of attitude or actions.  That, after all, is why we’re here.  Thanks to Katie Paine for pointing me to this great piece from Metzmash about how people are getting it wrong. Lot’s of good points.

And here’s a spot on piece from Marketer’s Lab about social media and ROI that I couldn’t have written better in a million years.  And I love that film!

Integration’s what you need

The whole debate about how to treat and measure CGM and MSM really does take me back to my uni days.  I studied Integrated Marketing Communications and had it drummed into me that PR, advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing were just all mix-and-match toys we could use to fulfill differing marketing aims.  The same is true of CGM and MSM -- they do different things.  It's not a case of either / or, it’s just another channel to add to the mix.

David’s point about the ‘listening’ side of social media is spot on.  But this takes it outside the realms of PR.  It’s about feeding into customer support, product development and other such stuff throughout the business – which is exactly what good marketing should do.  And now we have these feedback tools at our disposal, it puts PR firmly in the middle of business decision making.  And may be just what we need to swing the balance of power in the boardroom our way.