There are plenty of ways to measure success outside of ROI. I hope that yesterday’s post helped to shift your paradigm on the investment part of ROI and the humans behind your social web tools.
Measurement is absolutely critical in any project. Without measurement, do we ever really know if our work has been a success? We don’t. We can’t. Enough said.
Long-Term Goals vs. Short-Term Objectives
At Social Business Strategies, our clients invest money in our ability to help them build business communication strategies that leverage social web tools. They hire us to help them build Human Business Teams, from the people inside their organization, who end up manning the social web tools and producing social media. To show them how the needle moves, we have to break things down into long-term business goals and short-term business objectives.
In most most cases, the long-term goals are typically tied to external functions like awareness, annual revenue and profit. In order to reach those long-term goals, shorter-term actions need to be taken to reach immediate objectives. By setting clear baselines up front, we gain understanding as to how and where the needle must move, and the efforts it’s going to take to create the movement.
To highlight this, let’s use as an example our client Incept Corp. We’ve not officially started implementation of the strategy as of this week, but here are how the goals and objectives break down:
- Long-Term Goal: Develop an offering for their blood center clients that helps them with blood donor recruitment, creating an additional revenue stream. (There are financial numbers attached to that goal, but that’s between them and us.)
- Short-Term Objective: Call centers typically have a fair amount of turnover. With that in mind, our objective is to focus their Facebook Fan Page on showcasing their strong company culture to increase the recruitment and retention of CMEs (Conversational Marketing Experts).
To get to the short-term objective, we can now set baselines for measurement. For the Facebook Page, these metrics are pretty straightforward:
- Growth and retention of the overall fan base
- Increase in content submissions from the page admins that align with the content strategy
- Increase in overall page engagements measurable in comments, non-admin wall posts and video content views
- Increases in “Likes” on comments from lurkers
- Visitor conversion from the Fan Page to job application page on their website
- Percentage of growth in completed CME applications per month
- Higher number of interactions between management and CME’s initiated on the page
- Reduction of the quarterly turnover rate as a result of more open and transparent communication between management and CME’s
- Overall company sentiment on open lines of communication between CME’s and management. (This one is more qualitative, but it can be measured via polls and responses to questions.)
Can you see the difference?
It’s difficult to measure these short-term objectives in the paradigm of ROI, but with clear baselines, we can benchmark how much the needle moves. And once we’ve moved the needle, measuring financial returns against the investment of time and money becomes more realistic. In the short-term, our objective is to build and implement a functional tool (in this case, the Facebook Page). That tool will then be used as a vehicle, leading towards the long-term goals in revenue and reduced costs. Now ROI becomes much more realistic and much easier to measure.
What’s your take on setting baselines? How can you apply this thinking to your own business communications strategy? Have you broken down your business needs into long-term goals? And short-term objectives that help you get there? Should you?
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