Value in Social Media Marketing
MediaPost are reporting on a study conducted by Fox Interactive Media’s MySpace and Carat USA’s Isobar on the value of marketing via social networks. It is not easy to quantify, but their results start to show a way of measuring. However much anecdotal evidence there is, with a way to measure and quantify, it is extremely difficult to get money for this at the moment.
The metric, defined as the ‘Momentum Effect’ attempts to quantify the impact of the brand.
“We looked at awareness levels, responses to an ad, the number of people who came to the custom community–and asked what the exponential value of the conversation happening in the social network is,” Browning said. In other words, what value can be placed on the brand chatter among friends in your network?”
Key findings include:
- 40% of participants use SN’s to find out more about a brand or product they like
- 27% have said a friend in their network has recommended a product to them
- 31% say they spend more time on the web after joining one of the services, with on average 7hours a week spent on the sites.
- 70% of the value of a programme was attributed to the viral effect beyond paid media
The report gives no more details about the results beyond that using the networks are successful – which you’d expect research promoted by MySpace to say anyway. An effective programme gets 70% of of its value outside of the paid media, but no clues into what is an effective programme nor what value they assign the media in the first place. They are keeping that magic mojo for clients. We use many of the measures mentioned in the report – it’s not the measurement it’s the getting the agreed process to compare, along with benchmarks, that is the target in this game.
