One of the golden rules of marketing is having the ability to show your business or clients the value of the campaign that you are running on their behalf. With traditional web campaigns you could methodically calculate ROI based on Click-through rate and project your results. With the introduction of social media traditional models of analytics do not apply and the true value proposition is clouded in the minds of business decision makers. With the economy in it's current state campaign dollars are less readily available and you better be able to deliver tangible results.
How can I show value? Is this the right investment? I know I need to connect with end users but what is the real value?
The key is social analytics that focus on campaign elements specifically around sentiment, tonality, social fingerprints and a model for calculating the incremental value of community.
If you are working on a viral brand awareness campaign how are you going to gauge the discussions that are occuring and the content that is generated within a social network and make sense of it? You need to have a mechanism to take all of the unstructured data and make sense of it all in order to show value. The only social analytic tool that I am aware of that can support campaigns in this manner is Harvest Reporting Server 2.0 by Telligent.
With Harvest you can combine campaign specific keywords with system driven keywords that flow through the Harvest sentiment analysis tools. The net result is gaining a clear understanding of how users interact with the brand and the campaign by analyzing the tonality of the conversations that are occuring. Be it positive or negative, understanding how users are interacting with your campaign allows for quick responses to negative associations or additional investment in areas that create positive responses.
Also with any campaign the user profile is key. Understanding not only how users interact with content but how they interact as a whole is a key step in delivering the right message at the right time. With a social analytic system you should leverage one that provides a fingerprint for how a user interacts. Within Harvest you have the ability to easily identify how a user interacts within the community.
Finally when it comes to launching micro-campaigns within an existing community or social network such as one based on Community Server you can leverage the group functionality to create a micro-community. With Harvest Reporting Server 2.0 you can then analyze just the data that is relevant to that group. The same sentiment analysis and other functionality is relevant even on the group level.
Telligent and Harvest do not have all of the answers... but the tools and solutions provide a framework that can assist you in the areas where it really counts. Organizational efficiency, social ROI, and social analytics are the key to unlocking the full potential tied to your unstructured data. Again what is the value of user generated content if you cannot quickly analyze it and make it meaningful.