Win The Social Marketing Measurement Game

Measuring social marketing is hard. But too often, the solutions that marketers use — such as focusing only on engagement, cherry-picking only the best-looking numbers, or relying on vendors' blended single metrics — harm their understanding of performance rather than helping it. To measure the success of social marketing, you need to think of your customers' journey as a board game like Monopoly. Then follow three simple steps: 1) Identify which stage of the customer life cycle your social marketing program is designed to serve; 2) measure whether your social marketing efforts have moved your customers to the next stage of the life cycle; and 3) count how many times your customers pass "Go" so your company can collect the proverbial $200. If you keep your customers moving around the board, eventually you'll win the game. (This report serves as an update to the report of the same title, originally issued to clients on November 21, 2012.)