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Understanding the value

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Johannesburg - The value proposition has to be really understood before embarking on a social media campaign. This is according to Richard Mullins of Acceleration, a digital marketing consultation.

"Agencies sometimes battle about what value or information they are delivering and what should be measured," he says. It seems that whether campaigns are successful or fail spectacularly comes down to the roll of the dice rather than real business acumen.

Unlike other channels such as search, a tool to measure social media value still has to be determined. Therein lies the challenge - how to measure engagement. Take Skittles, which re-launched its homepage to direct users to its user-generated content sites.

They either ended up on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or could see Wikipedia entries on Skittles. Much of the feedback was negative towards the candy brand or social media marketing. At some point Advertising Age reported that traffic was no longer directed to the Twitter-branded page, but only to the Twitter search page.

Some of the results from the page did not make sense or were unrelated. The campaign was largely viewed as a failure because of this and the mostly negative response. But it did engage people. So the question remains, what does this mean for the brand in the greater scheme of things?

Mullins says the measure of success will depend on the objectives set out beforehand. All that can be done is to expect with a plan of action. Good or bad, some responses can be beneficial because they provide insight.

He points out that social media should not be thought of in isolation; it should be combined with activities such as search. Secondly, it should be approached as a long-term initiative rather than for specials or promotions.

For now, he believes social media's strength lies in its ability to collect data for behavioural and demographic targeting. He suggests having users decide what information they will make available to advertisers as well as managing their own preferences and profiles.

Advertisers cannot resist the massive amounts of audiences, despite immature ROI benchmarks and models. In 2008 $2bn was poured into the market worldwide, showing a 46% increase on the previous year. Despite massive growth, e-marketers have estimated spend to increase by only 17% this year, putting it at $2.3billion.

This is an adjustment from an earlier estimate of 32% growth.

- Fin24.com

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