When we conducted the 2008 Tribalization of Business Study, we discovered that those companies that were most satisfied with their community efforts were those that measured the impact of their community programs on their business processes the same way they would measure the impact of any other program on those same business processes.

So if you measure the impact of a certain program by increased store sales, or by improved customer satisfaction – then measure the impact of social media programs on those business processes the same way. Even if you think the current measurements are wrong. If you do not like how customer service is being measured by the average time people spend on the phone – it does not matter. Don’t try to change it when you roll out a social media program. The fact that the current measurements are well understood and often hardwired within the company culture will ensure that people will understand and embrace your social media programs rather than marginalize them as exotic new hype-driven non-mainstream programs.

Taking this a step further – the faster you can get the various departments that benefit from your programs to co-fund them, the faster your programs will become mainstream.

All that being said – how do you measure the impact of your social media programs? What works? What doesn’t work? As we are gearing up for the next iteration of the Tribalization of Business Study, what would you like to find out?

PS – If you prefer discussing the topic instead of just commenting on it, join the Marketing 2.0 community where I started a discussion on the topic.

I was invited to blog the latest ANA marketing conference on marketing accountability in Dana Point earlier this week. Due to the lack of Wifi at the conference and the launch of the 2008 Tribalization of Business Study yesterday I have not been able to get to write up some of the great points that were made at the conference. I will do so here and over at the marketing 2.0 blog over the next few days.

Bob Loidice, the President and CEO of the ANA, opened the conference with a pretty strong message to attendees – It’s Time to Reinvent Marketing. With technology having put the customer in charge, you need to think about all aspects of marketing differently – think differently about the buyer, think differently about media, manage your brand differently and think differently about your measurement platform.

It’s a message that I had not heard at a variety of other advertising conferences which I attended in the last 18 months – where most attendees and speakers were still very much in denial of the tsunami that is currently hitting marketers all over the world. Although I think I did hear Bob say that there are new tools for consumers to “receive” messages, a glitch which I’ll attribute to a lifetime of working in the advertising industry, his message was very strong and well informed.

In his welcome address he listed companies who are doing it well – including:

• GE, which developed a complete new system for marketing management
• IBM, which completely transformed itself (although I believe that would not have been possible if they had not experienced a “near death” experience)
• Google, with its Adwords business model
• Apple, with the iPod
• Toyota, with their extreme Six Sigma focus
• Burger King, where they outsourced just about all marketing to consumers
• Philips Norelco, with their clever Men Grooming campaign
• Mastercard, with their Priceless campaign
• Unilever, with Dove redefining beauty
• Best Buy, with their organizational changes that eliminated the importance of “face time”
• P&G, with their content driven pampers campaign

He also reviewed some of the depressing stats that characterize the state of marketing accountability in companies today – including the fact that 40% of marketing departments have goals that are internally focused instead of goals that are in support of corporate objectives, and that 30% have no measurement system in place whatsoever. No wonder that the marketing budgets are the first ones to go when the economy hits the skids – apparently with 60% of marketing budgets being decreased in this latest downturn.

The Society for New Communications Research released preliminary results of their New Influencer Study at the SNCR Research Symposium last week.

While there is no question that social media is rapidly gaining importance, it was interesting to see how they are (or not) measuring the effects of social media initiatives. Only 51% reported to be measuring the effects, and of those, the metrics they most value are enhancement of relationships with key audiences, enhancement of reputation, customer awareness of program and comments/posts relevant to organization/products.

As was brought up in the discussion following the presentation last week – it is interesting to see how soft most of those measurements are. First off, how many companies really measure “enhancement” of relationships or reputation? And how many measure customer awareness? Sure, large consumer-facing companies probably still do some of that – but aren’t those yesterday’s measurements cooked up by the advertising industry? Those that were meant to hide the fact that advertising cannot be effectively measured?

Surely we can come up with better metrics to measure the impact of social media initiatives – what about new customer acquisition, customer loyalty and customer lifecycle value, new product innovation success ratios, return on information, and customer referral ratios & values.