There has been much speculation about why Ben & Jerry's decided to forgo e-mail marketing in favor of a pure social media marketing approach.  For the most part, marketers are scratching their heads over it. One possible reason, suggests Charles Nicholls of SeeWhy in a blog post is that Ben and Jerry's probably cannot directly correlate conversion rates from an e-mail campaign.  "Unlike ecommerce sites, where email is the number one tool of choice for driving high quality traffic to an e-commerce website, Ben and Jerry's don’t sell on line - the ice cream would melt." In other words, a conversion for Ben and Jerry's is an in-store purchase. "While you can certainly measure the use of promotion codes and vouchers in-store, it's hard to gauge the footfall impact from an email campaign."

Nicholls can be counted among those who don't understand why Ben and Jerry's took this move, but his answer does suggest an interesting insight into how some brands may be thinking about social media - especially those that cannot track sales to a website.

Early Metrics

The next logical question, of course, is how can a social media campaign do better than what already exists? Truth is, it is still early days for social media marketing metrics, according to Linus Gregoriadis, Econsultancy's research director.  But as budgets improve, social marketers are increasingly willing to experiment. "Companies are clearly investing in social media channels - areas where there is still a struggle to measure results. That is not to say that companies have no guideposts with these invests. Rather, they tend to rely on "softer" metrics, Gregoriadis says.

In general, the most commonly used metric is increased sales, used by 79% of respondents to an eConsultancy survey. The second mostly widely used metric is increased traffic to website (used by 71% of companies). Also, interestingly, brand reputation (41%) and brand recognition (39%) are used by less than half of companies as metrics.

A Plan

A company embarking on a serious social media plan would do well to craft a plan beforehand on the metrics it will study, according to white paper on social media metrics authored by Jeremiah Owyang and John Lovett, and released by Altimeter and Web Analytics Demystified.

DIY Marketing boiled down their approach to five steps:

Step 1: Revisit Tradition for Solid Innovation. Many businesses don’t think through the traditional business rules that they know prior to deploying social initiatives or when measuring their effectiveness. "This is part of your integrated marketing strategy, not a vast new wasteland!"

Step 2: Make Learning Your Primary Goal. "Every measurable business objective provides an opportunity to learn about consumers and the ways in which they interact with you, your brand and each other."

Step 3: Define Requirements First, Then Select Vendors. Focus on your needs, not what off-the-shelf vendors can provide.

Step 4: Develop Your Social Media Measurement Playbook. Create a document that will keep the entire organization moving in the same direction in social media.

Step 5: Make Our Measurement Framework Your Own. Adopt this framework for your own needs and business model.