Yes, Social Is Working – The Power of Anecdotal Business Results
This post originally appeared in Text 100′s Hypertext Blog
I was one of the lucky ones who got a seat at the “Marketing Budgets Have Gone Social – Is it Working?” panel discussion at South by Southwest, sponsored by the Council of PR firms. The crowd came in droves to see if David Witt of Hershey (formerly General Mills), Julie Hamp of PepsiCo and Kris Narayanan of Samsung could answer the elusive ROI question.
All three brands have realized, in Kris Narayanan’s words, that “social media isn’t a playground; it’s a viable option for brands to communicate” and they’ve made it a priority. General Mills now spends about five percent of its marketing/communications budget on social and PepsiCo has increased its social spend to 30 percent across all brands, with some brands entirely devoting their budget to social (not surprisingly, Julie shared that the Pepsi Refresh budget was 60 percent social).
Surely these brands must have nailed ROI to secure this type of funding in their organization’s finite budgets, right? They must have created a set of KPIs that received buy-in from across company? Not so fast.
All agreed that regardless of their budget growth they ALL still struggle when connecting metrics with ROI. To increase support for social within their organization and unlock budgets, the panelists all recommended finding and promoting “business value” anecdotes combined with metric progress overtime.
So what does this look approach look like? Here are examples from each brand:
- General Mills – When the company launched their Fiber One bars they relied heavily on influencer placements like getting the products into the hands of Hungry Girl. Her comment that the bars “were better than Snickers” to her community of one million readers sparked online conversation and General Mills mapped the pulse and sentiment of conversation with the pulse of sales – finding that social conversations were the #2 driver of purchases. David Witt was able to take this anecdote combine it with cost deflection metrics for paid media and show that YES, social media is working.
- Samsung – A majority of Samsung’s social media metrics are based on conversation and sentiment within the conversations. When Samsung.com relaunched last year with more social features it was able to show that engagement increased by 200 percent, while online conversations about the brand increased and sentiment improved over the same time.
- PepsiCo – Try to ignore this anecdote – more people voted in Pepsi’s Refresh project than the presidential election. But the Pepsi Refresh project unlocked business value through more than votes – the positive brand sentiment ignited through word of mouth discussions was where the real payoff came. In another story from Julie Hamp, Brisk and Hess teamed with Foursquare to have buy one get one @Brisk for check-ins at point-of-sale. The test showed that sales increased 141 percent. Yes, social is working.
What I loved about these anecdotes is that these companies aren’t measuring by number of followers on Twitter or number of fans on Facebook. They’ve found quantifiable ways to link their activities to business results through correlations to sales and cost deflection – albeit not a perfect science, but it’s on its way. Most importantly they also look beyond the numbers to find qualitative examples of how they’re changing customer perceptions and building relationships.
What anecdotes have you uncovered through your social media program? What impresses your executives? What falls flat? Would love to discuss this in the comments.
A podcast of the session will be made available soon – we’ll link to it as soon as it’s available.
Note: The panel was moderated by Council member, Kathy Baughman, principal, HLB Communications and ComBlu.
- In: South By Southwest, SXSW, Text 100
It’s great to hear that large powerful brands are truly utilizing and understanding the engagement factor of social media and not relying on number of followers and likes. Their example gives hope to new brands and smaller companies that just because you didn’t double your followers in the last month doesn’t mean you are not increasing brand awareness and opening up conversations with your consumers. Great post.
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