The missing component in the marketing measuring matrix – From ROI, through SCRM and up to measuring individual context.
Marketers and analysts look through the measurement lens from the provider’s/brand’s interests. For marketers the efficiency of targeting me as a client is measured in terms of optimizing ROI (return on investment) – tools that are objective, based on segmentations and schematic categorization of actions, as part of their efforts to push my way what they think I need. They all strive to get closer to a lion’s share of the market they serve.
Integrating social media into the marketing mix arose the need for measurement of social relationships in a way that will provide data to help decision making as to how to build the marketing communication/social CRM mix efficiently to optimize ROI, so that their brands/offerings/services become impacting touchstones on a very diverse customer base.
Jeremiah Owyang’s social media CRM report and The social metrics and analytics show the complexity and evolvement of monitoring SCRM activities, since they require higher level analytical tools to help plan forward.
However, to me, the customer, it’s a completely different ballgame. The efficiency is measured in ROA (return on attention). The measuring scale should be based on relevance which by definition it is subjective and dynamic, based on the subjective proximity of mutual context around a specific interaction, not just around the analytics of a social graph – but around the specific combination of a particular instance of interaction around a particular topic with particular social contacts.
From an individual point of view the mindset is different. I, the customer/user am not looking for collective values that will keep me under the auspices of the tribal campfire. To me, any interaction is part of a long tail world of individualism. In my world, the needle in the haystack is optimal relevance to what suits/interests me best, and the measurements for responsiveness and immediate applicability to what I need now.
The icentered lens strives at optimal individual relevance, and that makes market and customer share immaterial. Allowing personal context to become the prismatic angle, through which I interact with the digital world, turns the overpour of web interactions into selective experience. I use/buy something because of its relevance to me, I share it with my social sphere because of its relevant value, not because of some corporate direction as part of a planned SCRM campaign . Its measuring purpose should reflect flexibility, adaptivity and responsiveness..
That requires a whole different measuring mindset.
The key is context. To start with, it transcends the boundaries of a specific product or service, and takes a holistic view of contexting people and not just specific interactions.
The context is two folded – the context of the social ecosystem that has just been created ad-hoc when I share something with someone from my social sphere, and my relevant context to become part of such an ecosystem.
My presence in different value levels in many ecosystems creates different value points both for me and for that ecosystem. I can be the center of this ad-hoc ecosystem, a close or remote node – but always within context to this ecosystem.
My different context values in different ecosystems is based on the ability to contextify me as a whole – the principle of contexting people and not the interactions. For each context based interaction a subjective scale of me within that food chain is created. This relativity of subjective values constantly fluctuates, depending on its merit in various context based ecosystems.
Analytics of the environment must take into account both participants – providers as well as users and mesh their points of view into models that reflect bilateral relations between them. It is clear that putting me, the individual, as a primary factor in measurement and analytical processes will lead to a new kind, not only of measuring tools, but to new food chains and economic models that will stem from putting the individual at the center and building all these tools around her.
