In the July 19 edition of Augie Ray’s blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals which appeared on SmartBrief on Social Media.com, Ray proposed that while brands like Dell and P&G can track the return on investment of their social media marketing and financial results, many other brands cannot.

Ray proposes that companies use balanced Social Media Marketing Scorecard when evaluating their Social Media Marketing efforts:

1. Financial: Has revenue or profit increased or costs decreased?
2. Brand: Have consumer attitudes about the brand improved?
3. Risk Management: Is the organization better prepared to note and respond to attacks or problems that affect reputation?
4. Digital: Has the company enhanced its owned and earned digital assets?

But the fact remains that numbers 2, 3 and 4 revolve around number 1.  For example, consumer’s attitudes about the brand may have improved, but if that improvement does not translate into dollars, what is the point of participating in social media marketing?  If a company’s reputation could potentially be at stake while participating in social media marketing, and such marketing is not producing positive financial results, is the reputation worth the risk?  And is it worth the time and money for a company to invest in enhancing its owned and earned digital assets (i.e. content, images and multimedia); if there is no financial yield?

We are sure that these questions will be debated about for as long as social media is a tool for communication and earning power.  And since social media is now a large portion of the fabric of how we all do business, we should all probably learn how to measure our efforts effectively.  We recommend you use SocialToaster, our revolutionary hosted platform which allows your supporters to automatically drive traffic to your website via their social network accounts like Facebook & Twitter, while providing you with advanced real-time marketing analytics.  It is more than a recommendation, really.  SocialToaster is the only product around capable of calculating ROI for social media marketing.  

SocialToaster and the metrics it produces will help you raise important questions and find exact answers as you consider a balanced social media marketing scorecard.  It will give you complete control over the message being shared on social networks, integrate with both CRM’s and e-commerce systems, and provide you with real-time analytics to show the entire social marketing process from visit to lead to sale.  The data we can help you amass will ensure your financial success; far outweighing the benefits of numbers two, three and four in Ray’s scorecard.

And finally being able to calculate the ROI of your Social Media Marketing will help you even out your own score! 

If you’re ready to put advocacy marketing to work for you, contact us at 855.62.TOAST, send us an email, or request a free demo!