Brad Ward has an interesting post on ROI with respect to Social Media.
http://squaredpeg.com/index.php/2008/10/29/what-is-the-roi-of-social-media/
As someone who develops and consults to Admissions/Development offices on their information systems, I am with Karlyn Morissette in saying that you can absolutely measure social media’s ROI. Every point of interaction should be captured, and Social Media needs to be part of any school’s marketing plan. Don’t confuse social-marketing with ad-hoc marketing…authentic doesn’t mean it has to be random and unguided.
Every ‘input’ into a school’s marketing activity incurs some kind of cost. At the admissions level, you are ultimately measuring admissions and retention yields. If you want to measure brand development/awareness, you can do that too.
While there are unquatifiable benefits of recruiting or developing donors through social media channels, what matters is if you are in fact getting students to be aware of your school, to apply, to stay in school and to donate back as succesful alums.
What may be a little different that prospect-source measurements of the past is that we are increasingly tracking multiple contact sources. The single 'referal' field is becoming a relic of the past. Marketing/recruitment ROI may be spread out among multiple 'touch-points'...facebook, website, twitter, chat, email and so forth, but ROI numbers are definitely not dead.
thoughts
Thanks for the additional thoughts in response to my post on social media ROI.
Agreed, ROI numbers aren't dead... although they are certainly harder to calculate/quantify.
For example... how did you find my post? You started following me on Twitter yesterday. Why did you do that? Where did you come from? What made you click through to my blog and read this post? That's where it gets hard for a University or college to track social media leads and results. Finding the correct source and tracking it.
ROI numbers
A couple of thoughts. It is difficult these days to track the direct impact of any lead, media or otherwise, precisely.
For example, if you had a booth at a school-fair and got a prospect's name from it, does the fact that they actually contacted you after checking out your website change how you classify that lead?
If you sent out an email to a prospect and they went on to research your school through a site like AdmissionsQuest and then applied from that site, which is the lead?
So, it's tricky but here's the thing. It's not really about any single channel--I think this notion of tracking 'sources' needs to be updated--it's about the aggregate effect of your activities and how that translates to yield. Social media does something we couldn't do before. It allows schools to develop their brand in a personal way. And the thing I underscore is that it is an aggregate effect.
At the macro level, what we care about is not the success of any particular channel but the success of the overall effort. Now, that said, at the micro-level...we do want to see how many prospects are connected on twitter, on facebook, on myspace etc...those can be tracked.
What we shouldn't do is try to attribute any particular medium as the source. I am not sure that makes sense in this paradigm (hate that word).
But I do take your point seriously. There is a inter-connected quality to this that is hard to describe or quantify. My take is simply that we shouldn't worry too much about the magic behind this stuff and just worry about the results.
Tracking ROI
This is what i am talking about http://thatsgreatprblog.com/2008/11/18/how-to-measure-the-roi-of-social-...
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