Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

SOCIAL MEDIA IS MULTIDIMENSIONAL

Social media is a contemporary phenomenon based on the mainstreaming of the Internet and the pervasiveness of inexpensive Internet-enabled devices and innovative new technologies that allow for cheap communication, in real time, across distances of complex information in many different formats. Yet social media isn’t new. Smoke signals, messages in bottles, carrier pigeons, wall paintings, stone sculpture, and other forms of historic communication are all, in various and different ways, social. Thus, while it may be easy to think of social media as only something that occurs online, it is important to understand that while enormous value is and can be created socially online, we must realize that social media also drives offline behavior. As a result, the analytical goals for many social media measurement strategies should likely include the measurement of offline behavior. As an example, consider that social media analytics must take into account the following scenario:

• A consumer is exposed to a social media advertisement across multiple social media channels.
• The consumer is identified to be a customer of the advertiser, who is considered desirable to be reached and possibly open to being reactivated into a consideration and purchasing cycle.
• The potential customer reads but does not click on the ad and begins to explore blogs, consumer reviews, product reviews, and the advertiser’s Twitter feed and finally decides to “like” the advertiser’s ...