Social media is a powerful tool, but it requires the right power supply and the right precautions to get the job done. Take a look at some expert advice on supporting, extending, and measuring its true value for your brand.

Social media can be a slippery slope for marketers. It's important to communicate with consumers, but spreading the word isn't always the best goal for your brand. In this interview, VP of JD Power & Associates, Chance Parker, talks about determining the value of social media marketing efforts, where brands belong in the conversation, and what can happen when your missteps backfire.

iMedia Connection: Your presentation at the iMedia Brand Summit is centered around what's "beyond the buzz". So what do you see as coming down the pike for social-fueled marketing?  

Chance Parker: I think it goes way beyond buzz. Buzz implies that you're simply looking at how often your brand or product is mentioned. What buzz doesn't account for is context. We focus on analyzing context and assessing the implications that drive actionable recommendations for our clients. Powerful technologies like text analytics allow us to provide in-depth analysis into the attitudes, behaviors, values, and perceptions of your target consumers. You can now understand the context of your brand and how it intersects with consumer's lives. 

Chance Parker is VP of JD Power & Associates.

In today's hyperconnected world of social media, companies need to know that the consumers shape the brand. So, social-fueled marketing must begin by listening and understanding before engaging. This whole notion of identifying influencers and trying to use them to propagate your message is applying traditional marketing to the new world of social media…and it most often backfires. What I see for "social-fueled" marketing is greater emphasis on empathy and listening, and a lot less emphasis on trying to dictate the conversation.

iMedia: Social media is great for spreading brand information via word of mouth, but it has a more disputed role when it comes to direct marketing. Is there a place for social media campaigns in this arena? 

Parker: There may be a place but for it, but it's a risky place. To date, consumers in the social media environment have sometimes reacted negatively when companies "butt in" to the conversation. One example is Comcast's customer service efforts. Comcast would monitor social media conversations for posts about Comcast customer service problems, then directly contact the poster. Many of the consumers reacted negatively to Comcast's effort, seeing it as intruding into a conversation they were not part of…"If I want to talk to Comcast, I'll contact them directly". That being said, there are also examples of more successful direct marketing in social media…but there are simply no guarantees.

iMedia: How do you recommend that marketers measure buzz in terms of its value for a brand? Are there specific considerations or criteria that lend themselves to a usable formula for determining the ROI of a social media campaign?  

Parker: Start by analyzing the volume of conversation around the brand and benchmarking it against competitor, substitute or complementary brands. From there, you will want to analyze the sentiment of the conversations taking place around the brand. This will give you insights into brand satisfaction, as well as the sub-topics and issues that are driving the positive and/or negative conversations. You can also begin to understand who is talking about your brand and understand who advocates are and who detractors are. 

iMedia: Brands are growing more tech savvy these days -- adopting tools like Twitter, Facebook, and others. But this can lead to over-reliance on these tools. How do you recommend marketers manage their expectations of what can and can't be done through these new technologies? Is there a limit, or a point of diminishing returns that you've been able to identify for brands that are engaged in social media marketing tactics? 

Parker: We see a lot of clients make a couple mistakes in evaluating social media conversations. One is that they assume that consumers will talk about their brand or products a lot, and that they will talk about it in the same terms that the company does. The truth is, most consumers don't drink the company Kool-Aid and, thus, they generally talk about things in very different ways than those within the company do. 

Secondly, they assume that low levels of conversation equal nothing of value. Often, the exact opposite is true, especially if companies remember to compare what is being said about them to what is being said about a key competitor.

As for the "point of diminishing returns," clients often want to squeeze more blood out of the customer's turnip than is really there. Social media is a powerful new tool to listen to the voice of the customer, but it's only one of many tools. You can't expect it to apply in all situations.

iMedia: What do you think is the safest bet for social marketing campaigns right now? And what's the riskiest? 

Parker: In our opinion, the safest bet for social media is using it to listen to your customers (or potential customers) to more fully understand what makes them tick. The riskiest, by far, is direct outreach, in which you ask the unwashed masses to co-create on your behalf. The social media landscape is replete with examples of this kind of outreach gone horribly wrong. And once it has "gone wrong", companies are almost powerless to get it back.

iMedia: You've been at JD Power & Associates through several dynamic periods for digital media. What's the most exciting change you've seen in how marketers measure the impact of digital and use that resulting intelligence? What's the most frustrating change? 

Parker: One of the most positive changes I've seen is the movement away from just looking at trend lines and clickthrough rates. Some marketers are embracing the insights revealed through social media to improve and innovate everything from products to campaigns. Never before in history have we had the ability to listen and learn as much about our customers as they're willing to reveal in the content they author in social media. But measurement is only one part of the equation; more important is understanding the context around the conversations taking place and gaining deeper insights into what is driving those conversations. 

By far the most frustrating is change of late, at least for me, is the belief that if we just have enough data, we can model anything…a unified theory of customer behavior. Modeling by its very nature assumes that the past is a good predictor of the future. Today, things simply change too fast and too often for this to always be true. Machines can certainly help, but they're still no substitute for us imperfect humans.

Jodi Harris is senior editor at iMedia Connection.

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