The hunt for the red herring: Measuring commercial effects of social media — Lazar Dzamic, Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice Vol. 13 No. 3

The need to prove the effectiveness of social media in producing sound commercial results is one of the biggest current barriers in making this new marketing paradigm essential in new communications mixes. As is often the case with new digital spaces that are being conquered by marketers, the knee-jerk impulse is to treat them as something that deserves a totally new language and ways of measuring. This has led to a sort of an arms race in creating new — and increasingly fanciful — ‘social media-specific’ evaluation frameworks. Our argument is different: marketers have all the metrics they need already, but the main barrier to a robust attribution of commercial eff ects to the social media is inadequate tracking between different digital platforms: the new social ones and the ‘legacy’ ones (eg existing company websites). This is the place — and the user actions that happen in it — that evaluation thinking and investment should be focused on, through three suggested joint approaches for arriving at a full picture. (9 pages)

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