Why it is so difficult to measure the impact of social media

My interest in social media and its impact on business has led me to dabble into social media for a fair amount of time. It is quite a new medium but has made significant impact on businesses, politics, opinion making, brands and what not. I consider the channels like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, Pinterest, blogging, Youtube, Slideshare, Instagram as form of social media tools. There are many more being added.

However there is a great deal of debate happening among the marketers about measurement of its impact on business – sales, revenue etc.; for example  this  article in HBR .

“If you think pageviews, unique visitors, registered members, conversion rates, email-newsletter open rates, number of Twitter followers, or Facebook likes are important by themselves, you probably have no idea what you’re doing. Those metrics are the most common false idols of analytics.”….

Likewise there are many views about which metrices are right or wrong.

In my opinion, social media is one of the channels of reaching out to the customers. Depending on what you are offering you can leverage this channel to achieve any or all of the objectives, namely : direct sales, message dissemination, improve speed of communication, brand enhancement, reputation management, create engagement etc. Eg.Personalities, political parties, social activists, news channels are using Twitter for giving out information/ opinion; restaurants, consumer goods are using Facebook to reach out with promotions.

We need to make use of the social media and its impact in the similar way as we use AAA approach – Awareness, Appreciation and Adoption cycle. But social media has added few additional dimensions that makes it interesting to use for direct engagement (not just communication) with the stakeholders at lower cost, provide response and enable experimentation with offerings at more targeted audience in less time. There are many examples of brands, personalities, services that have leveraged the media successfully. Business like  restaurants, shoe brands etc are able to get their audience’s opinion, create offering suited to range of audience or even let their audience create an offering based on their products ( eg. paintings / hand decoration using their material).

Thus every business has to create its own metrics depending on what it expect from social media in the given period of time. We work with our clients by first talking about business objectives and challenges they are facing in growing the business. Then we identify who are potential customers ( are they new ones or we need to tap into new ones). Then map them where these potential customers are spending more time ( which social media). And make a plan to reach out to them.  Based on that we create a metrics for different phases of time.

There are no right or wrong rules. Unless you take a plunge you can not experience it and hence can not correct it. If you are a newcomer at trying out social media do your basic home work and get going.

2 technologies that are shaping business transformation

I wrote this blog first for my company’s website.

We all know how IT has become center stage of business transformation in last few years. It has its own challenges that are unique and at the same time has opened up new opportunities.

The senior IT executives have to deal with operational and strategic level challenges all the time.  On one hand there are project delivery, cost management, resource management, vendor management issues on the other hand there are other strategic challenges such as aligning IT to business needs, creating a roadmap for business transformation through IT, keep pace with new technologies and protect the bottom line while doing all the above.

Being in the IT industry for more than 22 years, I am able to understand how challenging it is to satisfy the constant demands from businesses.

I just wanted to share with you two trends that I foresee would be the foundation of enterprise computing (that would replace traditional IT ) and how we can help you.

Open source is one of the key technologies that has shaped the enterprise IT and now shaping the consumer IT. Actually with BYOD kind of trends, the consumer and enterprise IT is converging. I do not have to tell you how Linux, middleware such as JBoss, database such as PostgreSQL have come to become trusted technologies in large enterprises. The major stock exchanges, telecom companies, banks and technologies companies such as Google, Facebook, Salesforce etc, have embraced open source technologies to drive business needs.

We certainly see the bright ‘clouds’ on the horizons, as a new technology that we think would shape the coming few years of IT and business. Cloud computing does not mean putting everything on the public cloud. We certainly see big merits in bringing the cloud computing as a way of managing IT infrastructure inside your data centre. The agility, flexibility and scalability (both – up and down) this model brings, is what all the CIOs and CEOs have been looking for.

We, as a boutique consulting company are specialized in helping companies bring about business transformation by use of open source and cloud computing technologies.

Capability and Capacity

When I was discussing the challenges of growing our business and hiring people, I said that our priority was to build the capability first and we can build the capacity later on. When I thought about this statement more, I realised that many organisations go through this challenge. Very often we have to take decision about hiring people in a given budget.

For example, the question that I was trying to address was whether to hire 2 people at entry level skills versus hire only 1 at an expert level.

With 2 people, it lowers our risk of failure (seemingly), it also allows us to regulate the cash flow.

On the other hand hiring one expert and having a cash outflow equivalent of two, increases the risks, if things don’t work out.

However the key question for me was more about capability vs. capacity. 1 expert gives us capability and 2 entry level skills gives us capacity. Based on the current needs I decided to go for ‘capability’ building.

Why I am happy to see ‘Twitter Drops Linkedin Partnership’

When I read above news, first thing that I came to my mind was ‘Ah! I would not be seeing Tweets on Linkedin stream’.

Frankly I really get irritated when people spam Linkedin, Facebook networks through their tweets.

First of all it is due to the fact that ‘tweets’ on Linkedin don’t have a neat look and feel. They look so alien with a short URL, few words and picture of tweet preceding it. It doesn’t look authentic ‘Linkedin’ experience.

Secondly, it also gives me a feeling that person is not genuinely interested in sharing the information with Linkedin users, but is simply interesting in ‘showing’ his so called ‘contribution to sharing’.

My view is that, if you really want to engage with your audience, really want to share the news, you should take some efforts in populating that particular social network in its native form.

In our real social networks we have different ‘networks’ of friends/relatives/colleagues etc. We treat each of them separately. When we share information with each ‘network’ we do it in a distinct way. Same should be applied on Virtual Social Networks (VSN) – Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook etc. If these VSNs are manifestation of our real social life, then we should treat each of them separately.

Social media shaping our lives?

For most people including the marketeers, social media is a form of technology which maps our behaviour into digital world. Actually this is how the entire automation or for that matter the computerization has started. We first tried to automate the routine work with the help of machines then we made them little intelligent by adding ‘CPU’ or brainpower. Think of machines – typewriters then word-processors on the computers or calculators and then spreadsheets. Think of the early use of computers for payroll etc. Essentially we were asking the machines to do our work. Most people ( who are 35 and above today) have to come to think of computers, internet as a way to map our tasks – personal work and office work in the internet world.

But social media such as Facebook or Twitter or Google hangout or Linkedin are proving to be much more than manifestation of our lives in the digital world. Though the founder’s of these companies might not have started with the grand vision and great psychological studies or with the intentions of changing the people behaviour, but these tools are precisely doing that – they are taking us into an era where our social behaviour is being shaped by them. Here are sample examples why I think it is happening :

Definition of friends : We all value number of likes and comments to our posts by our friends. We engage and connect with the people with whom we did not have in-depth relationships in real life. But we value their comments, we establish some bonds with them. With more and more people being on-line, the way new generation would think of ‘friends’ is entirely going to change. There are going to be more online friends than real life ones and they are the ones who are going to be more influential.  These influences would not have cultural boundaries. This wold lead to the behaviour patterns that have no historical pattern that can be studied. It is all going to be very new.

‘Hanging out’ : With the video chats and ‘hangout’ types tools becoming common coupled with online games becoming more interactive where do you think people are going to spend time on? What is going to shape their minds?

Learning process : We used to think sending to school was enough for the children to get knowledge and information. To give them something extra there were libraries. In a way, it was a linear process, there were defined ways of acquiring the knowledge. Now we want children to be all rounded at an early age and are exposing them, at times pushing them, to many sources of information – schools, tuition, classes, workshops, camps and online assignments. If that is not enough they are expected to understand the latest developments in each fields while learning the basics. For example we teach them ( in the schools) sound waves, light waves, fundamentals of electromagnetic theory, atomic structure etc and then we want them to know about the latest developments in satellite communication, nano technology, super computers etc.Essentially we want to shorten the learning cycle by pointing to the resources available online. Obviously they get pushed to spend more time going through internet and all these social resources.

The entire social media is going to acquire its own form, without we noticing it. The minds, culture, behaviour, societies and nations are  going to be shaped by what people get exposed on the social networks. Are we ready to embrace it?

Note : I have made the image by combining three different pictures available on various sites.