Developing Meaningful Metrics for Social Media

One of the main challenges for social media is developing meaningful metrics for success -- an important issue for Chief Marketing Officers and the finance chiefs who pay for these initiatives.

An interesting article in the Wall St. Journal, "Modeling Tools Stretch Ad Dollars: Chrysler Uses Digital-Response Data to Adjust Commercials, Drive Web Visits," outlines the steps Chrysler took and some lessons learned by Chrysler and its interactive agency, Organic, learned.

Here are some highlights:

• Chrysler and Organic experimented with different elements to not only drive traffic, but to boost sales.
• Planning started six months before the launch.
• They found that 70 to 80% of shoppers researched cars on the web before making purchases.
• Chrysler considered its campaign as an ongoing experiment. One tweak included tripling the amount of time that the URL appeared during the TV spot from two to six seconds. Chrysler also tweaked the homepage of its Ram Challenge Web site.
• A lot of the changes were made real-time, as metrics came in.
• Interestingly, Organic started including broader sets of data, ranging from sales data related to advertising in traditional media like print and TV to economic factors that affect car sales, such as housing starts, fuel prices and unemployment rates.