Post By Jia Liu from Blogger Jia | 佳佳溜世界
Companies before or after they entering social media field, do care about the ROI(either return-on-influence or return-on-investment). We understand such a situation because our traditional way of marketing has been in the market for years and social media marketing (including PR) still seems a geeky and uncertain cool way. But once you compared the difference between the old and new, you should have embraced the new social media marketing into your old portfolio as long as it suits your overall marketing plan, the execution and management capabilities, and the characteristics of your products and services.
Think about how you measure traditional media marketing as well as the SEO and website portal ads, do you really get some in-depth results after doing tons of homework. Maybe I should not say tons, because you really have few ideas about what’s going on. What you could for sure say is based on the brochures or web pages of a certain media when you do media buying. Go the Advertise with Us page on New York Times website, you get its circulation facts, such as how many home delivery, mail, individual paid ect. When you think about the industry terminologies, say reach, frequency, continuity, do they really tell you if a TV watcher is obsessed with your ads or is playing his/her TV control? Of course research agencies such as AC Nielson or your company itself could go deep into the receiving side of audiences but that really cost you a lot of money and energy as I have mentioned in the last post.
Social media as everybody knows is a combination of few big players such as Facebook, Youtube, Second Life and huge amount of niche fragments such as my blog, your podcast, or a cosmetics BBS in China. The facebook or Youtube ads are still practicing the old way of traditional media marketing, but the platforms themselves and many more niches together are doing some thing different. Here you can’t really know how big the circulation will be because even if your marketing campaign started on Facebook, it may go all the way to a small blog hosted in Shanghai. Your influence, be it big or small, just depends on how innovative, how authentic, and how good your products, services, and campaigns are. So if you jump into this field, you should use a totally different mindset. The whole web, plus all the traditional media channels are your sky. This equals saying there is no limit in circulation in terms of time and space. You may say that how could it be no ends? True, the execution of a specific campaign ends, but other social media practices you do will last if there is any triggering point which pushes web users to talk about you.
So, don’t be intimidated by social media measurement even if it’s indeed like an ocean. With the expertise and technology, you could read the minds of your consumers and react appropriately, be it promotional events, a blog post, or a thank you letter to them.
延伸阅读：社会化媒体测量PPT