Professional Documents
Culture Documents
by Peter Giuliano Coffee played a surprising role in the development of social media and virtual communities. Now, those communities are playing a surprising role in the development of coffee.
featur es
Tara Shenson Ever wonder how some social media pages manage to make success look so easy? Winning social media strategy is an art form perfected by a number of SCAA members; here they share their secrets for success.
16
Shanna Germain, with Liza Hausman, vicepresident of marketing from Gigya, Inc. Social media moves fast, from AOL groups to MySpace to Facebook to... whatevers next. Here, Liza Hausman offers some speculation on the future of social media.
Tim Dominick The coffee community relies heavily on social media and digital interaction to stay informed. But what happens when positive, introspective conversations take a nose dive into negativity and snark, and how do you navigate those dangerous waters?
Sarah Beaubien The Sustainability Tracking and Reporting Tool was developed as an industry-wide measurement tool that everyone can use. Discover what it does and how you and your business can get involved.
Tracy Ging The marketing world has changed a lot since the days of brand strategies and customer relationship management. Is it time to throw away those old marketing guidelines, or is there a way to truly mesh the old with the new? We ask. You answer. SCAA member Vittoria Coffee has Al Pacino raving about their coffee. If you could get a Hollywood A-lister to promote your company, who would it be?
23 Caff Breve
12
Contributors: Sarah Beaubien Tim Dominick Tracy Ging Peter Giuliano Tara Shenson
2010/2011 BOARD OF DIRECTORS President, Peter Giuliano 1st Vice President, Tim OConnor 2nd Vice President, Max Quirin Secretary/Treasurer, Shawn Hamilton Directors: Marty Curtis, Nathalie Gabbay, Al Liu, Ellen Rogers, Dr. Timothy Schilling, Paul Thornton, Andi Trindle, Willem Boot Immediate Past President, Mike Ebert
SCAA 330 Golden Shore, Suite 50 Long Beach, CA 90802 TEL: (562) 624-4100 FAX: (562) 624-4101 www.scaa.org
The Specialty Coffee Chronicle is published six times a year by the Specialty Coffee Association of America as a forum for discussion and information on industry-related topics and issues. The Chronicle welcomes and will consider for publication articles, columns or firsthand accounts of life in the specialty coffee industry from SCAA members. Opinions expressed in articles and letters do not necessarily represent the position of the SCAA, its members or directors.
Media
tandard return on investment (ROI) is a measure of the money you invest against the return you realize on that investment. Its a profitability ratio, and businesses have been using it for decades to, simply put, figure out whats working and whats not.
While this is a relatively easy thing to do when youre dealing with straight dollars and cents, the equation begins to look a little less like simple arithmetic and a lot more like quantum physics when you start factoring in social media intangibles like fan engagement, advocacy and brand lift, all of which are inextricably linked to online growth. We can probably all agree that these intangibles are good things (says the marketing professional to her counterpart: I have 2,000 fans and daily fan commentsthis is directly contributing to our bottom line, I can just feel it!). But, feeling it and being able to prove it are two very different things and the proving part has been at the center of heated debate in digital media circles for some time now. How exactly do we standardize metrics and figure these new tools out when the equation is so convoluted?
According to emarketer.coms 2009 survey, 84 percent of respondents admitted they did not currently measure the ROI of their social media programs. Somewhat more telling is that of those respondents, 40 percent stated that they werent even sure if they could track ROI from their social media tools. What this tells us is that a good majority of the business community has been actively using these tools based on a gut feeling, which, right or wrong, isnt a sustainable business practice. 2011 is proving to be the beginning of a shift in attitudes with regards to reporting abilities. Bazaarvoice released a survey that shows that 74 percent of CMOs predict they will finally tie social efforts to hard ROI this year, with emarketer.com reporting highest ROI data pinpointed to activities on Facebook, as well as ratings and review sites like Yelp. Until recently, soft-metrics (such as total fan count, total likes or fan growth patterns) have been the primary means of quantifying social media data. However, the combination of a more thorough understanding of how social activity connects to profits, united with the expansion of technology that can provide better tracking mechanisms, has opened up the door to a new era of insight and data collection.
Measuring the Immeasurable: How do you Connect Things Like Page Engagement to Revenue?
This is the million- (or more accurately billion-) dollar question. Most businesses know that fostering brand conversations and enabling customers to become advocates (digital marketing speak for good word of mouth) is not exactly a new concept and has already been working for them for years. The confusion factors in given the unfamiliar environment in which the conversations are happening in. Luckily, the offerings with regards to tracking mechanisms have evolved substantially since 2009. Facebook offers its Insights, its analytics page, which allows page administrators to gauge basic information with regards to user growth and activity, although this is still considered somewhat data-light for most marketing professionals who want to really drill down to the specific media consumption figures. Twitter is also readying its own analytics offering, which was still in Beta at press time. Additionally, there is Google Analytics and a slew of paid tracking sites that may or may not deliver the goods. But the next big thing that has many of us watching intently are the companies that are integrating with and pulling data from the Social Graph, Facebooks central brain, if you will, which is a data base of our individual interests and social profiles-that each of us have personally constructed based on our activities on Facebook, and external sites that allow you to sign in using Facebook (such as Amazon and the Huffington Post, among others. With the goliath network projecting one billion users by August 2012 (Time Magazine, Jan. 2011) that promises of a way to connect to one-sixth of the population. Of the current 500 million + users, a sixty-second snapshot of user engagement includes 510,404 comments, 382,861 posts liked and over 55 thousand shared links with a total of nearly two million actions performed per minute. Wouldnt you love to know exactly how many of those actions were connected to a conversation about your brand?
Once you have your end game, it suddenly becomes much easier to begin to strategize how to get from point A to point B and thus begin to measure the success of specific desired outcomes against applied strategies. It is also important to note the generational shift that we will experience over the next few decades, and being prepared to measure the value of social media against a new demographic of buyers and their unique expectations. Gen X is considered the bilingual generation; however Generation Y and the upcoming Millennial Generation (75 percent of whom state they have at least one social networking profile) have essentially been raised on technology and see it as a barometer of a businesss overall health and value. It will not be long (in fact, we are arguably already there) before not having a social media presence is akin to not having a company website. And more important perhaps, will be how the company engages with their customers within these social media sites and what emotional connections are established between buyer and seller during the social interaction. Companies like Gigya and others now offer solutions that allow companies to integrate Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. into their own websites to encourage their customers to amalgamate their social communities into the buying experience and in doing so, offer you the ability to begin to track social exchanges attached to your content. These services come with a price tag of course, but will likely become more widely available and thus more affordable over the next 1836 months as awareness and demand for these types of solutions grow. A quick snapshot of measurement categories to determine the R segment of the ROI include: intangibles: Community growth patterns return on engagement: Likes & Comments Shared content / Advocacy sentiment mapping: Conversation profiles more Direct Data: Conversion volume Lead generation Revenue growth attached directly to social campaigns Increased customer satisfaction and reduced complaints You will also need to define the I in ROI, specific to your strategy to see the full picture. Most social media campaigns define investment as simply time and effort, however more complex campaigns will likely also take into consideration financial components related to graphic designers, web programmers and web based solutions.