US, Non-US and Worldwide Online Advertising Spending on MySpace and Facebook, 2009 & 2010
2009
MySpace US
Non-US
Facebook US
Non-US
$465 million $25 million
Worldwide $490 million $335 million 2010 % change
$360 million $25 million $385
$450 million $100 million $155 million
Note: % change based on unrounded figures Source: eMarketer, December 2009
Undoubtedly a fair question. In most cases, any
resources dedicated to social media or online cam- paigning are resources that need to be taken from other budgets or departments - it’s not a zero-sum game; so every director, manager or volunteer as- signed to deploy your campaign’s online efforts must demonstrate that there are measurable ben- efits (read: votes) that can be directly attributed to your online campaign. This, of course, is difficult (if not downright frus-
trating) for those heading up the online portion of any campaign. Other, more costly and resource intensive activities aren’t subjected to the same de- mands of accountability. When was the last time a campaign manager asked “How many votes did that sign get us?” Nevertheless, campaigns will not hesitate to
spend a significant portion of their budgets on vot- er outreach programs that are widely accepted as good investments of campaign dollars: direct mail, phone banks, signs, daemon dials, etc, without hav- ing an actual handle on the ROI they received in return. Such direct voter contact activities are seen by campaign leadership as a valuable tool – the more you contact targeted or accessible voters, the more they are likely to hear (and presumably like, you’ve done your research) your message. And all sales rely on repetition, repetition, repetition. So the more often you are statistically likely to contact a voter, the more likely they are to pick up what you’re putting down, as it were. The good news is that the marketing world –
which has a good 4-5 years on the realm of politics in terms of social media adoption – is asking these same questions. Since the online world exploded in popularity and activity, businesses have been struggling to determine exactly how to measure the results from the money and time they spend on
64 Campaigns & Elections | Canadian Edition
-23% 3%
-21%
34% 65%
Worldwide $435 million $605 million 39%
social media and what impact (if any) that expen- diture had on sales and revenue. But again: what is ROI? The bad news is that there is no one univer-
sal way to measure the ROI from a wide variety of social media activities. How much is a positive comment on Facebook worth? What portion of an increase in sales can be attributed to our activity on Twitter? Will an endorsement by a prominent blogger have a measurable impact on revenue and therefore profit? These are the questions social media experts and
web-savvy businesses continue to struggle with as they work to justify engaging their target on- line community. There are a few case studies that show a direct link between social media usage and sales – Dell Computers sold $3 million in hardware through Twitter – but for the most part measuring ROI is still part science, part assumption. The upside is that online activities are becoming
easier to track – and more analytical tools are being developed to further dig into and understand on- line activity. You have metrics to track the activity on your website (visits, pageviews), Twitter (men- tions), YouTube (views, likes), blogs (comments, votes), Facebook (likes) and of course email (opens, forwards).
This is one huge advantage the online
portion of your campaign has over more traditional methods of campaigning; so it’s important to use them to benchmark and track your progress. But how do you use all the data to track your campaign’s social media ROI? To determine how best to measure ROI, it’s important to first deter- mine what you’re trying to achieve. Obviously, having the most voters cast their ballot for your candidate is the ultimate goal, but there are many smaller goals that can be realized on the path to the final goal. The first should be traffic – how many people
are checking your candidate out and being exposed to your material. This is one of the easiest metrics to track, although it is decidedly much more dif- ficult to conclude what that traffic means. As I mentioned, traffic can be best measured by visits of a site’s pages, posts and views of video content or pictures. Regularly measuring traffic will give you a good sense the kind of momentum you have or what kind of content attracts the most visitors. The second metric is what I will call “popular-
ity”. How many people offer their support by lik- ing your candidate’s Facebook page, mention your candidate online or in places like Twitter or share your campaign’s content. This type of user engage- ment can serve as an excellent, albeit imprecise, in- dicator of how well your candidate is doing vis-à- vis your competitor.
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