Plenty of Council members are asking us questions about social media ROI. As our research team scans all that’s been written on the topic, we occasionally come across little gems. One that may have escaped your attention is a section of a larger 2007 study, Never Ending Friending, which may provide some valuable rules of thumb and benchmarks for those of you diving into social media ROI.
The study was commissioned by MySpace which, at the time, was on the top of the social networking heap. You’ll likely want to skip the first 34 pages (unless you have a keen interest in MySpace circa 2007), and get right to the meat.
There, you’ll find a section called “The Momentum Effect”, which is a research project on the ROI of social marketing conducted by Rex Briggs of Marketing Evolution. The project studied social networking efforts from adidas and Electronic Arts.
Here are three tidbits from Briggs’ paper that give you some sense of the substance:
- Of 30,000 TV ads the typical consumer sees in a year, she forwards less than 5 to friends
- By contrast, half of the value created by the social marketing efforts studied came from viral connections
- The number of incremental consumers moved to a top box Intent to Buy by viral impact was (approximately) 3:1 against those directly exposed to the marketing message
The piece is chock full of additional tidbits, figures and benchmarks. Moreover, on page 44, you’ll find a good framework for social marketing executions in which the objective is to drive intent to purchase or recommend. You may be able to use a model like this directly, or it may simply be fuel for constructing and proving out your own model.
Note: do take the results in this study with a small bit of salt. It was funded by MySpace, and social dynamics for your brand and category may be different than for adidas or Electronic Arts. However, the methodology is sound and the thinking therein is instructive.
If you’re interested in learning more about MLC’s efforts to model different types of value created by social media (or you’d like to participate in the research), please contact me.
If you need help right now in thinking through social media metrics, take a look at our view on Return on Objectives. Or, MLC Members, check out the metrics portion of our Social Media Strategy Builder.
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