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

SOCIAL MEDIA “BRAND” AND “DIRECT RESPONSE” ANALYTICS

Social media is certainly about “brand” and is in fact essential to brand identification, awareness, and equity in the twenty-first century. If you or your brands aren’t on social media, do you really exist?

As someone who measures social media—or those who aspire to manage and/or understand social media analytics—it is important to agree on definitions. A definition, and certainly not the only and an arguable definition, of “brand” is the following:

The sum culmination of all the inputs, thoughts, feelings, and experiences whether real, virtual, or imagined perceived by an entity about another entity.

I think it is important to emphasize the words entity and sum culmination in the previous brand definition because when measuring the notion of “brand” in social media, we need to consider that brands are not only corporate but are personal and associated with real people.

Consider the impact of social media reviews for hotels on TripAdvisor or Expedia. How do you read them? Do you believe them? How have such reviews affected your decisions about commerce or influenced your conclusions about the brand?

The guidelines for social media analytics begin with understanding that with brand measurement, one is attempting to quantify the qualitative, which is often, at best, an educated estimate and at worst, value destroying.

Many advocates of social media also believe it is the channel responsible for a significant part of direct and ...