On Digital

Irfan Kamal July 17th, 2008

Direct marketing has long relied on good experimental design and techniques such as A/B testing to optimize ROI.  One of the appeals of Internet marketing has been the ability to optimize and track ROI on campaigns, and that’s also one of the ways that early Internet advertising was able to secure a foothold in the savvy marketer’s budget.

The use of (and buzz around) social media has been growing rapidly.  Is it possible – and, just as importantly, appropriate and desirable - to bring a comparable level of experimental and planning rigor to social media?

My short answer: yes, it is possible, appropriate and indeed very desirable for at a subset of social media and a subset of objectives (specifically, for branding/advocacy and for purchase/intent to purchase).

To the extent messaging and media can be optimized, it’s certainly very desirable from the perspective of a marketer or agency seeking to more effectively deploy and justify marketing spend.

There are many different types of social media (as covered in other posts here and on numerous other sites), including Facebook and Myspace applications, games, videos, blog outreach, microblogging outreach, podcast creation, microsite creation, word-of-mouth network campaigns and so on.

Messaging can, in general, be optimized – with greatly varying levels of difficulty (video and apps are very hard, word of mouth and microblogging communications are easier).

Media (that is, delivery channel or platform) can, in general, also be optimized, but some types of social media – e.g. apps on closed platforms and microsites – may be too linked to the medium itself to allow for cross-media optimization.

Large scale deployment and use of social media has the potential to become critical to achieving high ROI on marketing.

However, for that to happen, good messaging and campaign optimization must start to be undertaken where appropriate.

• Social Media , Strategy
• Comments(0)