Earlier this month, Starbucks announced a new advertising campaign that, among other things, has a big social media component. People can submit pictures for a contest via Twitter, while Starbucks is disseminating messages to fans on Facebook, and putting video about the coffee up on YouTube.
Not much new there. But, a question raised in the NY Times article about the campaign caught my eye:
Still, it is difficult to measure the effects of social media — a follower on Twitter does not necessarily translate to a daily Frappuccino drinker.
A follower is probably a fan, but their act of following doesn’t necessarily signal a change of behavior, increase in reach, or direct impact on sales that marketers need to measure.
I’m not sure how Starbucks is evaluating their social media efforts, but too often this is about looking at number of followers or friends or posts or tweets over the life of the campaign. Instead, I think that a more meaningful assessment for this and other campaigns might be measuring how brand loyalists’ participation in social media involving the company influences other people in their networks to become customers.
Here’s why I don’t think the other methods make sense and some rough ideas for tactics that I think would get meaningful social media measurements.
