Panel Members:

Dennis Stoutenburgh, President and COO of ILD, Corp.
Leslie Darling, Vice President of East Coast Media for comScore, Inc.
Michael Thomas, Director of Social CRM Strategy of Social Strategy1
Mike Gelfond, Executive Vice President of Client Services for Mastermind

From the program:

Understanding the dynamic metric system used to measure ROI

Key elements of accurately assessing your online presence. How to go from baseline to growing your business.

You can’t prove what you can’t measure.

Mike Gelfond: Focus on business goals. Start with listening tools. The second step is getting out there.

Dennis Stoutenburgh: We mind social media and the web to pull in sentiment and categories that will help the entire business. ROI isn’t necessarily only sales lift and product marketing. It can be for competitive intel. Improve other parts of your company to improve social media. If you do not learn to engage the way people want to be engaged with, someone else will. One of the critical ways to get a benchmark is a social listening platform. It can target where people are commenting on your products and what they’re saying. How are you benchmarking against your competitors? Get your CFO involved in the front end to help you create the benchmarks. Make sure you have the tools to create the data. Define success.

Leslie Darling: On the custom research side, we dig a little deeper. You really need to understand what your objectives are for social media.

Michael Thomas: People are talking about you online. Key is making sense of the noise. How do we get into this? Answer to that is listening. Mobile, listening and the use of Twitter.

Where does listening come in?

Mike Gelfond: Two kinds of listening: human listening and technology that gets back to you. See what journalists and bloggers are saying. What do people think about your brand? What don’t they know about your brand?

Technology is out there to pick up what people are saying, in the phrases they’re saying it, positive/negative tones. What is the human factor?

Dennis Stoutenburgh: Two parts of it: human factor in defining search terms so you don’t get junk. Second, when you get this in, and you want to create actionable events, you need to have human interaction. You can segment these things further from just sentiment analysis. You can have the ability to drill into just the data you want. Without the human element, you’re getting a lot of data but it’s not useful.

Michael Thomas: Listening tools: It’s how people talk about your product. Put that data into certain lanes in which they flow. All those pieces are what people are looking at when they’re looking to buy your product. It has to have a human element or you’ll get a lot of false positives.

Fire hose to garden hose to straw.

Leslie Darling: We did a campaign with Chase. We looked at the overall impact of the campaign on driving credit card applications and lift in usage of cards. We were able to see through social media how people feel about the card. How do they feel about Chase? Did they gain any market share?

There are a lot of listening tools out there. Companies are struggling to figure out which one to choose.

Dennis Stoutenburgh: Who in your organization can actually use the software? We look at traditional media too to get a sense of sentiment. There are still things going on in traditional media that can help in social media strategies.

I need to show a quick return. What would you suggest to kick off a campaign?

Mike Gelfond: It all starts with listening and business objectives. It’s important to know who’s behind getting in the game. Who’s going to support it? What are the goals we want to set? ROI doesn’t just mean a sale. It’s something that’s defined. Is it a brand lift? We can get people talking about it. The other thing is expectation setting. It’s an organic framework that needs constant refinement and it needs support. Planning for your reaction. People are talking about your brand. Now what? You’re never going to get 100% positives about your brand. A risk management is important. You can show a win on any level as long as everyone is in agreement as to what a win is.

Dennis Stoutenburgh: Long term includes integration among the whole company.

We know people are having conversations. We know they’re talking about something. What is not discussed a lot is mobile. The social audience is a mobile audience. How does the mobile/social audience affect what you’re going to do?

Leslie Darling: Overall social media strategy may be a short term plan. Maybe it’s based on seasonality. Or maybe it’s a long term strategy. From that strategy standpoint, where do you want to go? What we’re definitely seeing is mobile is hot and not going anywhere. A lot of loyalty programs are quickly moving to mobile. One of the reasons is apps. The whole way we go about getting information now. It all ties into mobile going forward.

Dennis Stoutenburgh: Mobile is a complete opt-in element, but it’s solving easily measurable issues. Walgreens gets your cell number and will text you when your prescription is ready to solve the problem of people ordering and never picking up.

Mike Gelfond: The lines are blurring right now between social and mobile. QR codes and augmented reality. QR codes are taking the place of where computers can’t be. Augmented reality is where social and mobile really come together. It’s the movie “Matrix” coming to life, and it’s all GPS based.

Michael Thomas: Bacardi campaign that featured a shortcode that I engaged with instantaneously using my mobile. When I look at ads in magazine, I’m wondering what their return is.

What has come up in social media listening that weren’t on the table before?

Dennis Stoutenburgh: You’re going to find things when you begin this process that are going to create ROI that you don’t know about when you get started. The key to creating R is to control the I.

Michael Thomas: The key point is to know where you are today.

Where do you see listening tools going?

Leslie Darling: Having a syndicated report where you can take a look at very targeted audiences, where they go, what types of comments they are making. Not sure if we’ll get there, but that’s where we’d like to go. There’s no signs of stopping.

Just read Groundswell. Now what?

Mike Gelfond: What’s really key is that social and mobile are happening too fast. No one is an expert. You need to be a student of the game. Fail forward and fail quicker. Set proper expectations. Make sure everyone’s comfortable about moving forward.

Lift: The B2B Social Commerce Summit is a “must attend” event for marketing executives, senior management and business owners looking to apply real-world social tactics that drive sales lift to their business.