Tech Marketing Blog

Social media is all the rage in the marketing industry and certainly in tech marketing. But a recent MarketingProfs.com  social media study suggests that 70% of responding companies believe they are not adequately measuring their social media efforts.

The study suggests that the biggest hurdle to social-media measurement is, apparently, finding the personnel to do the measurement and analysis: Asked to select the most-applicable measurement obstacle from several listed…

• 30% of the respondents pointed to “dedicated resources.”
• 25% selected “don’t know what to measure.”
• 20% selected “social media measurement isn’t primarily about ROI.”

If your actively participating in social media, your first step should be a plan based on business objectives and criteria for how you will judge the success of these efforts.  Technology marketers have been adopting these social media approaches quickly for fear that if they don’t, they will be behind their competitors. In many cases these quick to react scenarios leave little time for properly setting up the approach.

Can you imagine if you were to go to market with an extensive lead generation direct mail or email campaign that has no back end metrics planned, how does a marketing group justify the expense when questioned?

No soap box here, but a word of advice. As you would plan and execute any other media effort, apply the same planning and metrics to social media. The social media option can play an effective role in your marketing mix, if you measure the activity and adjust accordingly.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 8:58 AM and is filed under Tech Marketing, Tech Marketing ROI, Tech Marketing Trends, Tech Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.