iStrategy Amsterdam: measuring ROI/ROE in Social Media initiatives

Measuring ROI/ROE in Social Media initiatives isn’t easy. As announced in a previous post, I was keynoting at the  iStrategy conference in Amsterdam on Oct. 26. On top of the short video clip which I have recorded with my team in order to introduce the keynote, I have also prepared a fully-fledged slidecast on Slideshare. The package also includes a downloadable version of my dashboard at Orange.

Measuring ROI/ROE in Social Media initiatives

We are spending more and more on social, and that – whether we like it not – means that there must be a shift in our attitude regarding ROI of social media initiatives. So, while we need to measure things, there is now a requirement for us to:

1. dissociate ROI from just sales (savings work too!)
2. dissociate ROI and ROE (which is also a valid measure)
3. know what we measure and what with
4. take all this with a pinch of salt as the goalposts keep moving and we need to adjust constantly (the “Klout” index for instance keeps shifting.

Important notice about the slidecast

The slidecast for this presentation was recorded on the day before the iStrategy presentation which took place in Amsterdam on October 26th. It is therefore slightly longer than the actual presentation which lasted only 35 minutes (this slidecasts lasts for 45 minutes).

Due to a bug in Slideshare, I wasn’t able to synchronise the sound and slides properly but you can download the presentation and change the slides manually while listening to the audio.

There is a sister presentation to this one, i.e. the social media dashboard which I will let everyone download too.

Important notice about the monthly Orange social media dashboard 

This Dashboard is a version of our Orange Social Media monitoring panel as of mid-October. P¨lease note that it was issued on the eve of a major change of the Klout score algorithm and that therefore I am not certain that I will not replace this metric with another more reliable one.

This dashboard is an attempt at making sense and putting numbers behind our social media engagement and presence, it is no way comprehensive and it is not meant to achieve anything else than help us hone our skills and improve engagement with our audiences.

Note: this is the monthly dashboard and doesn’t include the more in-depth analysis which is being produced by the team on a weekly basis.
As the question was asked, the data source is either socialbakers or Twitter counter, or Tweetreach, or even Google Analytics for the most part.

The data is crunched into Exel and then injected through Adobe Indesign. The initial design was done by a graphic artist and the maintenance is done in my team. The job of maintaining this dashboard is a couple of hours per month and should not be more than this.