Social media – use it to measure, rather than measure it?

Oct 25, 2010 by Dirk Singer

US media strategist and business week columnist Ben Kunz points us to a fascinating case study from US digital agency Organic.

Faced with the constant question every agency in this space is familiar with of “yes, but how does it drive sales?”, Organic hired economist Jason Harper to work in the Detroit office for US car clients.

Instead of scrabbling around with post campaign reports, Harper took a different approach – to predict whether a marketing campaign was hitting targets mid-flow by assessing the level of chatter.

In other words, social media wasn’t evaluated, it was an evaluation tool.

According to MIT’s technology review, a ‘velocity and acceleration’ model constantly measured social media activity and (importantly) the momentum it was gathering as a way to see if a campaign was on track.

As it was, Harper was able to prove that consumers who engaged with one of (auto brand) Jeep’s “online touch points” were twice as likely to schedule a test drive at a dealership.

Image – Darren Hester