Here is what I mean: Diesel used to offer an exclusive preview of its latest collection to its email club members 1 week before anyone else on the planet could see it. The fact that, for example, British Gas may have an average email opening rate of X, while Diesel Jeans may have an opening rate of 10X - and this goes for different categories and types of emails sent at different points in the customer journey to different audiences - doesn’t create a meaningful ‘email standard opening rate’. Average Value Per User is likely going to be your key metric. However, if you are a travel company, the key focus is likely going to be re-purchasing several times within the same year and up-selling additional products such as excursions, car rentals and travel insurance. Your metrics and the framework are going to reflect that. If you happen to be a car company using social media to talk to current customers who have just purchased one of your cars, you may focus on three things: (1) up-selling accessories and added-value products such as breakdown insurance, (2) generating word of mouth (mouse) in a customer's social graph, so that they influence their friends’ purchasing decisions in your favour and (3) keeping the brand front of mind during the next 3 years, if you are lucky, before the next purchase. Here's a quick example: products with a long purchasing cycle and those with a short one. As a consequence, my evaluation framework could be quite different from yours. ‘Social media value’ is a relative, not an absolute, category. In other words, my value in social media is your wastage what works for me may not work for you. So far, based on my experience and endless conversations with clients and peers, it is some mix of all of the above - and it is brand specific. Therefore, to be able to show how social media create value, we first need to define what ‘value’ means.
#Red herring fallacy examples in commercials full#
This is the place - and the user actions that happen in it - that evaluation thinking and investment should be focused on, through three suggested joint approaches for arriving at a full picture. Our argument is different: marketers have all the metrics they need already, but the main barrier to a robust attribution of commercial effects to the social media is inadequate tracking between different digital platforms: the new social ones and the ‘legacy’ ones (eg existing company websites). This has led to a sort of an arms race in creating new - and increasingly fanciful - ‘social media-specific’ evaluation frameworks.
As is often the case with new digital spaces that are being conquered by marketers, the knee-jerk impulse is to treat them as something that deserves a totally new language and ways of measuring.
The need to prove the effectiveness of social media in producing sound commercial results is one of the biggest current barriers in making this new marketing paradigm essential in new communications mixes.