The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age

Another Scorecard

Forrester Research proposed a ‘balanced marketing scorecard’ in its July 2010 report, The ROI of Social Media Marketing (reproduced with permission). (I won’t belabour the differences between marketing and PR again.) The motivation for the report is one I share whole-heartedly as you’ll know by now; it refers to the desire to determine ROI but that ‘many benefits delivered by social media are not easily measured in dollars and cents’.

The report doesn’t reference the work we started here in 2009 but takes quite a different stance entirely. It refers to Kaplan and Norton’s augmentation of the financial perspective with the three non-financial perspectives – or ‘indirectly financial’ in the words of the report – and then presents a way forward for social media:

Because social media delivers a broad range of advantages to marketers, a similar approach [to the Balanced Scorecard] is necessary to fully capture the value delivered by social media programs and tools. A balanced social media marketing scorecard will consider and monitor effects across four perspectives that balance the short term and long term and the directly financial with indirectly financial outcomes.

It prescribes digital, brand and risk management perspectives in addition to the financial perspective. The digital perspective is qualified by the question: ‘Has the company enhanced its owned and earned digital assets?’; the brand perspective by: ‘Have consumer attitudes about the brand improved?’; ...