One of the main reasons that brands start with social is its value to online reputation management. Most marketers know that getting consumers socially engaged with their brands can generate positive sentiment in the social space, but the challenge comes when it's time to prove a campaign's value. That's where the Social Contribution Index can help.
The Social Contribution Index of a campaign can be defined as the relationship between the percentage of total mentions a campaign earns for a brand vs. the percentage of positive mentions that a campaign earns for a brand. It's an excellent metric for understanding the effect that different campaigns have on the brand. It also provides insight into which campaign types your brand should move forward with. Let's take a look at an example using real numbers:
A coffee house that we'll call 'Jeffrey's Beans' (no relation to Geoffrey Beene) has started a social media campaign called 'Jeffrey's Beans Great Coffee Giveaway' where consumers can enter to win a year's supply of free coffee by interacting with the brand through various social media sites.
In order to find the Social Contribution Index of the Great Coffee Giveaway campaign, we'll need to use a tool like Radian6 to find the percentage of social media mentions and the percentage of positive mentions about Jeffrey's Beans that spurred from the Great Coffee Giveaway.
In this example, the Great Coffee Giveaway accounted for 0.95% of Jeffrey's Beans total social media mentions (40 out of 4,230) and 9.30% of the brand's positive mentions (40 out of 430) during the campaign, putting its Social Media Contribution Index at a staggering 984. This means that the giveaway campaign added over 9X more share of positive sentiment than it did brand mentions.
Evaluating multiple campaigns in this fashion will give you a better idea of what types of campaigns your brand should be focusing on. Did your giveaway promotion generate more positive buzz than your discount promotion? Consider investing more activation funds in your next giveaway campaign. The key here is to learn what works best with your audience and then increase the scale with hyper-targeted activation techniques.