Green Tea Ice Cream

Kami Huyse at Communication Overtones has a post calling for input for a workshop on the ROI of social media - how to measure it, whether one should, how reliable measurements are and so on. There’s a also half a dozen links to yet more information articles on the same or related issues. Coincidentally (or not, depending on your philosophy - and everything is connected, y’know) there’s also an usually concrete post on HorsePigCow on the same issue. I particularly liked:

I don’t know if any companies do this, but I’d encourage you set up internal cheers and jeers (or call them whatever means something to you) wiki pages. On the cheers wiki page, paste in the happy emails, blog posts, etc. and personal stories of positive encounter with customers. On the jeers wiki page, paste in the negative feedback, the angry emails and/or the lack of reaction at all. Don’t compare yourself to anyone else but your own goals. And don’t get down if the jeers page is full and the cheers page is empty. Think about the jeers as things to work on and customers to win over…as opportunities. Think about the cheers page as ideas for ways to create more of that…more opportunity.

This is something I’m going to ask us to do right away.

[pause]

OK. Done. Meanwhile, I’ve been looking at the metrics for using “student brand managers” (horrible term) on Facebook which turn out to be brutally simple. If all your brand managers are Facebook ‘friends’ of yours, you can see exactly what they’re doing! Add this to a bit of Google Analytics tracking of Facebook referrals that result in goals and you have (once you take into account how much your BMs are costing), fairly solid numbers to compare to your average cost of customer acquisition. What do ours look like? So far, we don’t know - we’ve only just started. But I’ll let you know in a couple of months. And yes, we’ll be keeping a close eye on any qualitative results that might emerge.

What we’re training them to do whilst they rampage around other people’s groups? That’s for another post. And yes, we are a not-for-profit and we use our black arts for good…