Delivering Insights That Matter Through Social Media - Setting Your Scope of Work

So you are beginning your first Social Media Measurement project and you want to make sure you are going to do deliver information and insights that ultimately your client will view as successful.   You have sold your client on the broad "capabilities" but now need to quickly shift into getting scope around the engagement and more so being precisely clear on what their expectations should be...managed expectations == a managed project.   

The first step to achieving scope in the project is by clearly segmenting your work into a discreet set of potential work products.   The broad scope should align to broad marketing functions so you have a clear client or set of clients that you are serving.   I have found that this is really the first moment of truth for your client as in understanding that social media measurement is a really broad horizontal capability that is verticalized for the different marketing functions through sets of different products and services.  Do not EVER forget the fact that broad horizontal product offerings POWER things but DO NOT SERVICE things.  So basically what I am saying is that if you are broad technology company trying to sell direct to a marketing organization then you better be ready to service this business.  I digress....

Now the 3 main marketing functions that are serviced through social media measurement are in my opinion the following:

Market Research - Consumer Insights
Advertising - Paid Media Comapaign Efficacy & Earned Media Equity Analysis
PR - Campaign Efficacy
PR - 1to1 Outreach

Now one must acknowledge at this point that the Consumer Insights component is something that is also a horizontal asset as it can be applied to different verticals in marketing.    ALL of marketing can benefit from a robust insights product.   Therefore allow me to stop here and focus my next post on development on a consumer insights product through social media measurement :)