Recently, contributor Ambal Balakrishnan from Click Documents, interviewed Tom Pick, an online marketing executive with Minneapolis-based B2B marketing and PR agency KC Associates. He shared his thoughts on this year’s marketing evolutions and on social media ROI.
Tom, who blogs about B2B marketing on Webbiquity, believes that with increased time spent on social media marketing, C-level executives will pressure their teams to demonstrate measurable ROI from these programs.
And because of the necessarily labor-intensive nature of social media, companies will seek to automate efforts where possible, such as analytics.
Google Analytics and the convergence of social media and mobile
Tom further says, that recognizing this need as well as the convergence of social networking and mobile devices, Google will continue to expand and refine the social media and mobile device/browser tracking capabilities recently added to Google Analytics, putting the same type of pressure on social media monitoring vendors as it has on traditional web analytics providers.
As social media marketing matures from hot buzzword status to just another element of the marketing mix, marketers will need to develop more strategic, comprehensive models of how it fits within their overall marketing plan as well as how to apply uniform metrics so that social media results can be measured in the same way as other marketing programs.
It’s unlikely that any analytics provider—even Google—will emerge with a single, all-encompassing “Swiss Army Knife” style tool for social media measurement, Tom says.
So marketers will need to continue to seek out and integrate results from multiple specialized point-solution tools.
You can follow Tom on Twitter here.
Ambal Balakrishnan is the co-founder of US-based ClickDocuments. Ambal’s book “Content Marketing Tweet: 140 Bite-sized Ideas to Create
and Market Compelling Content” will be published in Spring 2010. Ambal is specialized in content marketing, social media marketing,
B2B marketing and much more. You can connect with Ambal on Twitter here.
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