Marketing - ROI and Social Media

In the past 15 years the web has become a massive platform for advertising and naturally companies want to be able to prove its effectiveness (though none would deny it works to some extent). On the one hand the internet provides better analysis of this than say a traditional billboard, since web analytics, the most famous of these being Google Analytics, can tell you how many people have seen an ad on a page, and how many people have clicked it, whereas it would be more difficult to count how many people had walked past a billboard. This measurement however becomes more difficult when we try and measure the impact of social media since it is more difficult to know if a conversation on twitter for example results in a sale. However, many have argued, and I would agree, that social media has highlighted a division in the word marketing between sales or ‘getting the message out there’ (depending on how you define it) and the concept of ‘communication’. While still undoubtedly marketing to some extent, social media allows you to build a community around your brand. It is interesting to come to this from the point of view of magazines, since above all products they have been built upon community and conversation, with their inclusion of letter pages, competitions, reader Q & As etc, so it is fascinating to see these types of communities being built up around more traditional products for example the Starbucks Facebook page etc.