Greg – Share of Voice (or discussion) is an important metric, usually placed in the intermediate category between output and outcome. As a consequence of Share of Discussion, something happens in the business — you have higher awareness (and inclusion in the consideration set), or build greater understanding of your brand messaging, or your reputation improves, etc.

But the more important point of your comment is about the information you receive from participating in social media! If your potential customers (or their influencers) are on social media or are moving to it, you need to be there to participate in the discussion with them. Otherwise, you rely on advertising and mainstream media that are losing audience to social.

Connect that 4-5 hours a day on social media to some aspect of business outcomes, and you’ve won the war.

Thanks again for commenting.

Thanks a ton for the link you sent me. I can use it great as reference for my thesis and for the literature review.

To your points:

1. Well yeah, I see the problem of the comparison of ad-supported websites with not ad-supported websites. Now, if I’d take a non ad-supported website, like coca cola, the traffic I generate with Facebook, I would not have to pay as advertising to an other publisher (opportunity cost calculation). Yes, I’m making all content equivalent to advertising (It’s the only way to calculate a real number – As you said: Fan Value is Poppycock). I suppose tough you’d at least have a lower-limit with this number, since a Facebook fanpage generates emotional attachment and all the good things all of the social media marketers are talking about.

2. Well, for us as publisher every CPM is different (especially I think here in Switzerland we have very high rates). I just went ahead and assumed something (To give you a hard number our average CPM is about 30CHF, which is around 26$) . Of course every advertiser would have to take his own CPM he pays to publishers, to check what a Facebook Fan is worth.

So in the end you are right. You can’t measure the value of a Facebook fan but at least you can set a lower-limit and evaluate if it is more beneficial to display advertising on a secondary website or create a Facebook page and have the lower-limit + not measurable value.

I posted an article by the way, that says that marketers don’t believe that social media boost revenue (http://www.social-brand-value.com/2010/04/23/does-social-media-enhance-your-roi/)

To Ad Impression: I just looked it up and the term is obviously only used over here in the German speaking parts ( weird!, since the term is in English). Would have to check what it is in English.

Thanks again for your link and the comment…would be great to hear what you think!

Cheers
Daniel

First, you illustrate very well one of my main points: trying to establish a universal formula for these matters is likely impossible. Driving traffic to a site (one assumes) is about more than gaining ad impressions for potential advertisers. But as a publisher, if you were advertising-supported, this would be a logical way to monetize your Facebook fans — you’re gaining logical data.

However, if you’re not a publisher, or not ad-supported, the data doesn’t help you. If you try to use this same formula, you’re making all content equivalent to advertising (problem!)

I will object to your use of assuming CPM – you have to use actual numbers — what you are charging for ads — for the Fan value to be real. You also might benefit from changing what you are calling AdImpressions — they’re visits, right? Number of unique visitors, time on page, views per visit: all of these are good, solid data. You might want to read Seth Duncan’s paper (it may be a lot of review for you), which in its second half, delves deeply into the relationship between web traffic and various intermediate outcomes (sometimes called outtakes).

http://www.instituteforpr.org/research_single/web_analytics_a_methodological_approach/

Thanks again for your comment…

http://www.social-brand-value.com/2010/04/14/putting-a-value-on-your-facebook-fanpag/

Cheers for now.

Greg.

Greg Longmuir
Director, Sales and Online Marketing
Sleepy’s the Mattress Professionals.

We believe there is value in fans – and for certain types of companies, we could determine revenue per fan (we’d need a direct sales situation). We know that consistent communications with prospects tends to lead to conversion, but we don’t yet know whether Facebook fans equate to actual prospects. Not too much unbiased research is out there. We need to know the impact of fandom on awareness (we can guess it improves it), disposition (we assume people won’t become fans of brands they don’t like), intent to purchase (not just an assumption, but some type of repeatable formula to determine how many active fans translate into how much improvement in intent to purchase), and finally, actual sales. Then we need to pull out other influences to that purchase decision, net out the cost of doing all of that, and we’ll finally know what the ROI is on Facebook fans.

We also need to keep in mind the various biases that can influence research respondents — this is not an easy thing.

My beef is the casual way that Vitrue assumes their way to a value calculation.

To answer another of your questions more directly, I believe that arriving at a “fair CPM” depends on too many factors that vary with subject company and target audience. It’s not going to be that easy, doggone it!

Lastly — we also could debate, as @KDPaine has many times, that CPM and awareness numbers are the totally wrong answer in social media. Even measuring the extent of involvement or activity is fraught, because we don’t make it all the way down to outcomes. Advertising lives on potential — and we need to ask the questions about whether it is the end-all and be-all of marketing.

Thanks again for your comments.

Greg

Cheers for now.