Social Media Success = Conversation

As I suddenly find myself in the role of fundraiser, I know that the only way to increase funds is my building relationships. I can cite article after article where this is the case so to save a whole lot of space, let’s just say I can prove it and go with that. Anyway, my challenge now is to build relationships. My current marketing plan includes direct mail campaigns, a golf tournament, a PR campaign and inviting groups for a tour. The hardest part is to get people engaged enough to pay attention to what you have to say. For fundraisers, being funny isn’t always a possibility.

That being said, I have been studying social medias influence on donor-nonprofit relations. Up to this point, I’ve been trying to figure out how the heck to measure it.  As simply put in Social Media Metrics (Sterne): the number of friends/followers is not a measure of success. What is, however, is how many are actually engaged. Sterne goes on to define engagement, since that will be the next obvious question: Engagement is when someone cares and interacts. Ahhhhh…. So how do you determine if they care?

Social media is unlike any other existing marketing tactic so it can’t be measured like we have for any traditional medium. Social media is about a conversation. If you are having a conversation with someone – and hopefully many someones – you are succeeding.

KD Paine’s blog on Measuring Social Media stresses the most important part of a conversation: LISTENING. By listening to what people are saying about you and to you, you can then respond, react, act, improve, change, etc. That’s why it’s a conversation. Rarely is a conversation a one-way street.

Hoffman and Fodor’s article,”Can you measure the ROI of your social media marketing,” suggests that you can’t measure the company’s investment … you have to measure the customers investment. This way of thinking is really helping me to set goals for a social media campaign that is measurable. The authors say to measure using four key motivations: connections, creation, consumption and control. These represent “investments” that the customer is making to engage with the brand. It can be a blog comment, registration on a brand community, a tweet or Facebook comment about a company, review, etc. It’s up to the marketer to make these ways of engaging available.

The motivation to become engaged is still left to the consumer. But, it’s a lot like advertising. You can tell them about your product, you can offer incentives to buy it, even hand out free samples and coupons, but in the end, it’s still the end consumer’s decision whether or not he is motivated to purchase. Social media is much the same. You can attract consumers to your social media with cute videos, funny or unique pictures, even interesting content but in the end, they still have to be motivated to want to be engaged. THAT is more the tricky part of social media, not whether to be on Facebook or Twitter or both and how often to post. There must be some perceived value in someone taking time to interact with a brand. Therefore, the marketer needs to identify what that is so the relationship has a chance of growing.

Take for example the American Red Cross. In light of the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, becoming a “fan” of a high-profile nonprofit that is clearly taking the lead in aiding Japan in some way, affiliates you with them. As such, you might be looked upon as someone who supports disaster causes, who cares deeply for their fellow man, a compassionate soul.  In some cases, this type of “reward” is worth the interaction.

While it’s hard to quantify “awareness” as an objective using marketing techniques, if you allow awareness to be defined as building relationships and that being accomplished through engagement, you can then quantify and put an ROI on your social media efforts.