A case study conducted by V. Kumar and cofounder of Drums Food International Pvt. Ltd, Rohan Mirchandani yields results in ROI that will make marketers salivate. This study published by MIT in 2012 attempts to calculate ROI in two campaigns carried out by Hokey Pokey, a super-premium ice cream retailer in India. The campaign followed a seven-stepped framework that would ensure the campaigns success.
Hokey Pokey, using social listening systems, monitored the social media conversations surrounding the topic of ice cream. They then identified key influences or individuals that are most likely to spread their brand through word of mouth (WOM) as well as potential influencers who have similar interests. Through incentives, Hokey Pokey recruited these influencers to spread positive word of mouth first by creating a campaign called “Creations on the Wall” and then a second campaign called “Share Your Brownies”. The objective of these two campaigns was to increase the Hokey Pokey brand by increasing WOM.
Why are influencers so important?
The Charles Hubbell’s classic network centrality theory in short explains how important a person is within a network and in this particular context, a social network. Each person, or user, is considered a node and depending on their connectivity, they can be highly influential or not at all.
The results were astonishing, Hokey Pokey experienced a 40% sales revenue growth rate while brand awareness grew by almost 50% and Social media ROI grew by 83%.
This article is provides one key element to the calculation of ROI. The importance of influencers whether it is on Twitter or on Facebook is vital to spreading word about a brand or a product. Growing brand ambassadors is very important if any brand wants to get themselves known and increase their own market share.
Thoughts
This article builds a foundation to calculating ROI in the use of social media. Although Kumar and Mirchandani only used this research to isolate and measure ROI almost using just influence alone. It is a vital part in the overall calculation of ROI for a company as a whole when investing in social media.
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