Marge Ainsley

AMA Northwest Network Event with a spot of freestyle beatboxing thrown in for good measure

We had our first 2010 Northwest Arts Marketing Association Member Rep event on Tuesday 9th February, arranged by myself and fellow member rep Mike James. Contact, Manchester kindly hosted our event and 27 members (as well as a few non-members) showed up to debate and discuss how to measure the impact of social media.

Baba Israel, Contact’s Artistic Director gave a freestyle beatbox introduction to social media marketing. Not to be missed - view my (not great picture quality) video here. I challenge other AMA network reps to top this for an introduction to a networking event!

Claire Will, Head of Marketing and Communications at Contact then formally kicked off the event, presenting her ideas of how to measure the impact of social media marketing both quantitatively and qualitatively. This set the tone for the evening, which also found members going back to the ‘why’ and ‘how’ we should be using social media as a tool for communication. This was raised at the recent AMA Digital Marketing Day i.e. although we need to embrace social media and find out how things work, test things, learn from mistakes - we do need to be strategic and understand where our target audiences are operating online.

Claire recommended measuring impact qualitatively through the following ways (taken from her handout). 1. Conversation - in what ways has social media allowed you to have more meaningful dialogue with rather than just a monologue to customers/audiences? What conversations have you been part of through social media that you may not have had the opportunity to do before? 2. Relationships - what new relationships/partnerships have you developed through social media? 3. Advocacy - do you have many influential followers on twitter? (Use the most influential to strike up conversations with, They could become advocate for you). 4. Perception - how are we being talked about? How are we perceived? What lists are we on? How do people refer to us.
We’re never going to be able to robustly track the actual number of visitors through the doors because of social media or the WOM it generates. However, as Claire said, we’ve got to have some kind of benchmarks and measures in place to justify using social media to our teams, boards and funders.

Social media analysis tools such as Klout, Social MediaFirehose, ad.ly and SocialMention at least go some way to helping us justify our investment.

A huge thank you to Claire and the team at Contact for hosting our event. Lots of food for thought. If you’d like to host our next event or have ideas for future topics, get in touch.