What does a ‘Like’ mean for a brand’s bottom line? Marketers at Cannes Lions revealed the challenges and solutions, as reported by Marketing Week yesterday.

With more non-traditional campaigns than ever making it into the shortlist for awards, digital and social media is gaining credibility.

However, Diageo chief marketing officer Andy Fennell focused on the challenge of measuring effectiveness of social media activity asking how brands can put a price on engagement.

This is something that the DMA Social Media Council highlighted back in April (2011) in The value of Social Media Report, which surveyed UK business professionals.

The main aim was to discover how companies were using social media and their attitudes to the channel.

Over half of the respondents rated the future role of social in direct marketing as extremely important and 96% said it was at least somewhat important. However, one of the key findings was that social media measurement was trailing behind. 

The report says: “Many companies define success as the number of followers or the number of likes and pursue that number as an end in itself rather than a means to an end. Less care is given to what you do with all these likes, followers and blog readers.”

According to the report, marketers should focus on retaining the attention of social media users, initially drawn to a brand by a one-off incentive, for example.

It goes on to state that retweets, likes and shared links are measures of engagement – but marketers need to associate them with concrete business metrics like revenue, ROI and so on.

Marketers need to understand why people connect through each channel, including what their motivations and expectations are. They need to know the extent to which people interact with a brand or company through more than one channel.

And for this, the report says, they need more sophisticated, integrated CRM and other database solutions.

Read The Value of Social Media report  

Posted by

Sarah Wright