Problem Statement
Dresden works as a digital strategist at a company known as Online Advertisers (Samosh, 2012). There is a growing business opportunity in social media marketing. Bilbilly, co-founder of Online Advertiser, and Dresden are considering creating a new division in their company, Online Advertisers Social as a platform to take advantage of the growing social media marketing. After doing a research for three weeks, the two partners eventually came out with a potential value proposition. Further, they completed internal analyses and competitive industry with an objective of identifying the potential path forward. Dresden’s goal was to devise a value proposition which leveraged on their company’s strengths while creating a unique way of differentiation. However, the challenge was social media metrics.
Purpose/Objective
The purpose of this memo is to suggest ashort term-goals as well as long-term goals for addressing challenges of social media metrics.
Short-term goal: investigate legitimate and reliable ways of measuring effectiveness of social media. This can be achieved by first analysis factors, which has made social media campaigns which are successful to be successful and identifying factors which differentiate them, and also try to find out if they could be measured.
Ong-term goal: Find an effective way of calculating ROI of social media. This can be done by developing more rigorous ways of calculating best estimate of ROI.
Alternative Solutions
Solution #1: Community management strategy
Pros: It produces the right amount of content which helps keep the community engaged.
Cons: Designed in such a way that it attracts anyone to join the online community. However, this strategy may attract so many friends in a short time. The problem is that there is a high probability that the friends attracted does not want to listen or engage. In addition, friend seeding can result in making the consumers irate and in the process they give negative feedback, and thus create a negative image online because the increasing number of users are neither involved nor interested. In such a sort of environment, it will be very easy for negative social responses to go viral and spin out of company’s control. And once a negative comment or response spreads online, it is almost impossible to contain.
Solution #2: Campaign management
Pros: The method provides an easy way of measuring ROI than the campaign strategy. This is because campaigns existed with a specific time periods and could be linked with target markets, online conversations, and online content.
Cons: The presence of qualitative measures make the data challenging to quantify during the measurement of the success of campaigns.
Recommended Solution
Solution #2 is the recommended solution. Despite the presence of qualitative data, the method is advantageous in that it can lead to a fairly accurate and realizable ROI.
Action Steps
The following actions need to be taken:
Make a list of factors that define the success of social media and ROI
Classify potential clients in terms of competition, industry, and social media strategy
Sort measures which apply only to campaign management and discard those that apply to community management
Hire a researcher to do a survey using a questionnaire prepared from a list of factors that affect success of social media
Analyze the data and present the findings in an appropriate platform
Implement the solutions which have greater impact on the success of social media and accurate way of measuring ROI.
Works cited
Samosh, Dan. Mission Impossible: Measuring Social Media Return on Investment. Ontarion: Richard Ivy School, 2012.
