Trying to answer Robert Scoble's "sixth question companies ask about social media"

The question Robert was asked about social media is “how will this help my sales”

This is such a complicated question but I want to get something simple to measure this in the hear and now, not get into some discussion about customers are doing your marketing for you discussions and it strengthens your brands. It probably does but I’m an engineer and like numbers

I think there is some opportunity to put together some metrics for this to at least start measuring this. If I were to start doing this today I’d pick three things I’m trying to achieve and focus on measuring them. In order they’d be:

1. Am I selling to new people?
2. Am I selling more to a customer?
3. Am I selling more into an account?

Even with these simple three items there is a difference in the B2B world and B2C. I had a post earlier with examples from Sam Decker at bazaarvoice on B2C companies. Since I work in the B2B area I’ll focus on that. Now with all these metrics it’s not going to be 100% accurate (people delete cookies etc) but the trend should be what we focus on.

Selling to New People

If my goal from my social media efforts is to have it sell to new people then I better be doing something to drive that. Just creating a forum doesn’t do that. So let’s say I have lots of content and good cross linking to my products pages and on-line evaluation and stores. In this case a few things I would measure:

1. In bound traffic to my site for new site visitors that comes from pages I didn’t create (my “social media” content).
2. Visits by the people in 1 above to pages I consider as product evaluation or consideration pages on my site.
3. Requests for information, download, sales visit by these people (leads or opportunities).
4. Purchases by these people.
5. Keep a history of where “first contact” came from, so if they purchase later on you still know you got them this way.

That’s pretty simple, today there are plenty of technologies to track people as anonymous users until they provide information based on a fair exchange so we should be able to log this. What I would do as a company is choose some high traffic pages and sources and use that as a testing ground to get the metrics right before some crazy effort to instrument my whole site.

Selling More to a Customer

Companies with a strong customer service bent tend to have community sites for their customers to learn more. The thought is successful customers are loyal customers. Some thoughts on this:

1. For specific customers compare activity (active and passive) on community sites to amount spent in a year.
2. How does activity (active and passive) compare to growth year to year? How does service renewal change based on activity?

Selling More to an Account

This is different from a customers. This is about penetrating an account further. The “send this link to a colleague” for example, that’s about getting people to share useful information. And hopefully with somebody else interested in that topic and your products. So some things here:

1. The referral could be used as a source about new people (the Selling to New People section above).
2. New contacts, leads and opportunities in accounts versus activity in community areas by contacts in those accounts.
3. Look at sales from an “account” (the definition needs to be defined by you) and compare that to the activity of people in the “social media” elements of your site. The goal should be you’re selling more into these accounts.

My Summary

I always struggle with people that want to use “social media”, the “build it and they will come” philosophy is not one I adhere to. You have to define what your goals are, how you’d define success and how you would measure it. Only then can you really be successful and not just spend money with somebody that’ll put up some forums, blogs, wiki’s … add your own web 2.0 buzz word.

For example if account penetration is a goal I would get the Sales force to identify target accounts. Use that information to provide an added incentive to site visitors from those accounts to refer their colleagues. Why not give newsletter subscribers from those accounts an incentive of an ipod drawing to refer their colleagues or maybe their boss to your newsletter? Then you have an opportunity to get new people from that account, and monitor for the right “profile” person to register from that account and there you go a tangible “lead” for sales that could turn into an opportunity. This is one example of something that can be done to make sure we’re doing something to give us the desired result not just creating a newsletter or a forum but with all of these ideas it comes down to having specific goals, your definition of success and ways to measure yourself.