[...] C’est bien souvent une étape sous-estimée et certains Community Managers en ont fait les frais (consultez cet article.) [...]

In light of some new data that emerged on eMarketer indicating that marketers aren’t measuring their social media results, I’ve posted brief overview of ways to measure social media success.

http://www.davehaber.ca/interactive-objectives-blog/2009/9/23/measuring-social-media-success-fail.html

All the best,

Dave

[...] finished reading Jeremiah Owyang’s blog on ROI for online communities and social media. The entry is here. Jeremiah’s suggestions are accurate and some of the comments from our colleagues are really [...]

[...] A few months ago, social media guru Jeremiah Owyang wrote how online community managers need to prov… [...]

[...] Owyang of Forrester Research writes about in his post on how important ROI is now during the recession for many professionals working in PR and [...]

[...] Community Managers Must Deliver ROI: Commandments For Surviving a Recession (tags: community management) [...]

[...] Community Managers Must Deliver ROI: Commandments For Surviving a Recession | Web Strategy by Jeremiah [...]

[...] Another fellow blogger added an interesting post on Community Managers Must Deliver ROI: Commandments For Surviving a …Here’s a small excerptWeb Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing. Jeremiah Owyang discusses how web tools and social media enable companies to connect with customers …. name (required). email ( will not be shown ) (required). website … [...]

[...] Another fellow blogger placed an observative post today on Community Managers Must Deliver ROI: Commandments For Surviving a …Here’s a quick excerptWeb Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing. Jeremiah Owyang discusses how web tools and social media enable companies to connect with customers …. name (required). email ( will not be shown ) (required). website … [...]

[...] Community Managers Must Deliver ROI: Commandments For Surviving a Recession Jeremiah Owyang provides sound advice to Community Managers on how to step up their game, provide continuing value and (most importantly) help keep their jobs in these tough economic times. [...]

Mike P / @nhscooch
Mzinga

At Impact Interactions, we believe that ROI is a crucial element of the community building and management process. You must start building your framework before the community even launches, then refine it over time. But you cannot use just the metrics from your community, you must align them with additional data from within the organization (CRM records for B2B for example).

For B2B support clients, we measure technical questions answered by members as a cost avoidance measure to demonstrate the scalability of the community versus call center costs. We supplement it with survey data on customer satisfaction, purchase influence, and information utility. It all adds up to a large ROI.

For a marketing focused B2B community, we built a framework that demonstrated the influence that the community had in influencing sales of multi-million dollar contracts. We mined the transactional data and compared it with the CRM records to develop a pattern of influence on sales velocity, lead generation, and sales.

For a B2C automotive parts company, we compared sales transactions from the companies e-commerce database with community transactions to find the ROI for the community. It also reinforced the powerful notion that community members were buying more frequently than non-community members and that each purchase transaction was larger than those of non-community members.

For a B2C subscription based service, at Participate.com we demonstrated that community members churned at a rate 50% lower than non-community members, resulting in millions of dollars of revenue and profits.

Each of these clients had an ROI on their community of over 100% once their communities scaled.

It is not hard to develop the ROI framework, but it does take time and relationships within the organization to get the appropriate data. If you are a community manager, you need to build a network outside of the community area in your organization in order to align the community’s analytics with your organization’s focus and goals. Only then will you be able to tap into CRM or e-commerce databases to validate your framework.

We have some basics on B2B ROI in presentations available for free in our Social Media Resource Center on our website. Please feel free to visit and download the presentations. In our introductory deck on Impact Interactions, we have quotes from Cisco, Mercury Interactive, and ATT on their ROI from their online community efforts. Here is the link: http://www.impactinteractions.com/social-media-resource-center.html

What Jeremiah has posted is absolutely spot on. But is up to you as a community manager to act. In this environment, you cannot afford to have your community (and job) viewed as a soft application that doesn’t produce tangible, measurable results.

With nonprofits, they look at numbers, but also have to look at how the technology supports their overall mission of service both in the short term and long term. So, while some activities don’t necessarily “bring a profit” — they have to quantify and qualify outcomes or changes (positive) on the people served.

Numbers are important, but how you package and tell the story behind the numbers is also important and how you communicate that to decision-makers sharpening knives.

ROI Story Telling Techniques for nonprofits. Perhaps they not all are translatable to profit driven endeavors and not sure if these hold water in a recession.

* A well prepared ROI analysis incorporates both the numbers and non-financial factors into a concise and informative presentation

* The purpose is to demonstrate concrete value.

* The ROI analysis should present the key issues, numbers, and facts while spotlighting the investment’s contribution the organization’s mission and people served.

* ROI numbers, no matter how compelling, may not speak for themselves. They need context. That’s where the survey data can help – and also getting a specific and compelling story to make the numbers come to life.

* Clever storytelling is one of the quickest and most effective ways to gain understanding

* Creating effective stories to share the numbers also takes understanding your audience — what do the decision-makers care most about? Understand how and where to place stories and numbers for the most impact.

A very timely post. One of the steps I’m taking at LiveWorld (where I’m the “social media evangelist”) is creating a simple spreadsheet that tracks my leads, particularly at physical events that I attend and that we using marketing budget for.

A rudimentary calculation — and one that doesn’t necessarily account for relationship building that may prove to be more fruitful in the long term — is total cost of events (conference ticket, travel/lodging costs, etc.) / divided by number of leads generated. That gives you a cost per lead!

Surveying our customers is a brilliant idea, too, and one I’d like to implement shortly.

Bryan | @BryanPerson
LiveWorld

[...] Elsewhere on the web: Jeremiah Owyang offers online community managers some commandments for delivering ROI in a recession. [...]

les Community Managers doivent booster le ROI, ou prendre la porte…

Si les agences ont avec plus ou moins de velocité embauché des community managers, elle ont été promptes à les mettre à la porte à l’aube de la crise (c’est à dire maintenant . Jeremiah Owyang dresse quelques idées à destination des Com…

[...] Community Managers Must Deliver ROI: Commandments For Surviving a Recession Surviving lesson for community managers (tags: communitymanager roi) [...]

[...] Owyang has a great post at Web Stategy by Jeremiah on the importance of showing results from your efforts in the coming year. I posted the entire [...]