Here at Juice Digital we think we’re pretty good at what we do. What we do is social media marketing. We’ve been doing it since early 2008, got some great and happy clients and won numerous awards for the results we’ve achieved for them.
But, do you know what? We’re not good enough. And if you’re a social media advisor, client-side or agency, neither are you.
We get paid for what we do and that, generally, is to deliver whatever objectives were set for the social media activity. But there are important tools and techniques that are crucial to what we do that, currently, just aren’t fit for purpose. Here are a couple of the important ones:
- Influence
The accurate measure of social media influence is crucial for a successful social media marketing campaign. But what techniques are available to measure it? Services like Klout and Peer Index are meaningless outside the blinkered world of the social mediarati. They are pretty much useless as tools to identify influencers – individuals, groups, bloggers, media channels etc – on behalf of brands.
Then we have the services like Technorati, Alexa and the like. Which are fine if you are a slave to the numbers. ‘Your blogs gets a lot clicks so you must be influential’. Really?
There are scores more tools ranging from free and simple to expensive and sophisticated and most have some use. But none come close to ‘nailing’ the issue. At least none that I’ve ever seen.
So what do we do at Juice? Always be on the search for the current best of breed of course.
- Monitoring and Evaluation
A favourite subject of mine. Listen. Evaluate. Measure ROI. That’s our mantra. There are lots of tools, free and paid for, to help us do this. We’ve used many of them. They have their strengths and weaknesses. No one tool can give you everything you need, so we create dashboards to integrate different tools and measures to monitor the effectiveness of our campaigns.
Taken together these can be useful. But useful isn’t enough is it? This is so crucial to the development of social media marketing that we need a ‘gold standard’. So far, it doesn’t exist.
I’m a ‘certain age’. As such I had one of the first mobile phones. The brick that you could just about get in your briefcase (remember them?). I had mates who had the original ones with the separate battery units. I reckon that our current techniques for measuring influence and ROI in social media are about as far away from what we really need as these phones were to the iPhone.
It’s a huge issue and one where clients, agencies and developers on the supplier side must work closely together to speed up the progression.
So, here’s the challenge. I invite anyone as passionate as we are about these issues, whether you’re a ‘competitor’, client, supplier, whoever, to get in touch and let’s see if, together, we can help move things along.
Steve Downes @stevejuice
Juice Digital, Manchester
