Metrics and ROI are some of the best and worst things about online marketing, and by extension, social media. It just depends on who you ask, what day of the week you catch them one, or perhaps what meeting they just left.
Since we’re covering, in some great detail, how to understand metrics and analytics with Facebook let’s have a look at how one organization measures their ROI in relation to their Facebook efforts. We want to make sure we are covering measurement from within Facebook and without. This case studies has more to do with off-Facebook metrics like money saved and community-building than how the internal Facebook analytics work or creating an analytics dashboard via Microsoft Excel. Please know that you don't simply stumble upon these results. Careful planning and monitoring are paramount to finding success in any campaign on or off Facebook.
Barbara Porter is the Assistant Dean for Academic and Student Affairs at the Mayo Medical School. The Mayo Medical School is closely tied to the world-renowned Mayo Medical Clinic. When discussing the benefits and ROI that they’ve seen with using Facebook, she describes how the social network has enabled the school to save time and money on their new student orientation process. Since the Mayo Medical School has adopted Facebook as part of their on-boarding process for new students, the school has seen a savings of more than $20,000 per year. This is because the team building exercises which traditionally were required to integrate new students into the culture of the school are no longer necessary.
Because of Facebook, “The teamwork has already been established. They’ve camped! They’ve planned camping trips before they ever get to the medical school.” Mrs. Porter spells out the two overriding returns the school has enjoyed by embracing the platform and two primary goals the school is reaching towards: socialization of the students or help with team building and saving money for the program so they can reallocate it for better use elsewhere.
Mrs. Porter explains. “The positive impact number one - they come as a coalesced team and two - it saves us money.”
“Facebook has really changed how we do orientation at Mayo Medical School,” she said. “We no longer have to operate with the assumption that nobody knows anyone.”
Before the school created their Facebook page, the school staff spent a considerable amount of time learning each student’s name along with some of their particulars so the student could be welcomed into an environment where they felt like someone was paying attention and cared. “We didn’t want them to feel isolated,” Mrs. Porter said when discussing some of the staff responsibilities before the creation of the Mayo Medical School/Facebook fan page.
Things have certainly changed since those days. Now Mrs. Porter finds that the students know everybody in their class when that arrive at school. The current class has a Facebook fan page named “MMS 2013” that they are invited to upon appointment to the program. Everybody who gets appointed is a member of the page according to Mrs. Porter. She finds that this is because they want to make sure they know their future classmates, upcoming events, and school-related information.
Since the page now allows students to mingle virtually and meet well before the first day they arrive on campus, they are already well-acquainted with each other at a much earlier point in time relative to previous school years.
“You know, our student body is nationwide,” says Mrs. Porter. “So the kid from California already knows the kid from Tampa. The kid from New England already knows the kid from Phoenix.”
The end result (her ROI): it saves Barbara Porter and the rest of the staff in the Office of Academic and Student Affairs the effort they used to expend to get new students acclimated to the new school culture at the beginning of the school year. With this new freedom and the additional time allotted to devote to her incoming class, she and the rest of her team can devote their efforts towards things like the speaking with the incoming students about the health care system in America or spending additional time on the curriculum.
The Academic and Student Affairs Department does looks at the analytics in relation to their fan page, user profiles, activity, behavior and traffic. However, all these metrics roll up into their over reaching goals of saving money and increasing the effectiveness of their socialization efforts. By monitoring their users through analytics and responding appropriately to the results, Facebook has become an effective platform for the school to address socialization needs earlier in the process and away from their campus.
Now they can spend time new activities “as opposed to the time and money we used to spend on socialization,” confirms Mrs. Porter. This is invaluable to the school “because it is important that they recognize and know each other and be able to build that teamwork that is such a value to the school and the Mayo Clinic.”
This is not to say that embracing Facebook as a primary tool in the on-ramping process was a walk in park for the Department of Academic and Student Affairs. Like many people who are introducing social networks into their team processes, Barbara had her naysayers. The responses from those unbelievers are pretty typical of the criticisms one hears at other organizations. Typically they are the result not from experience, but from ignorance. So my advice is to expect this from some members of your team and don’t let it stop you. Most objections are easily overcome as we see in Barbara’s case.
“So, what a lot of the faculty may perceive as fluff, we can now cut that fluff because it’s not necessary for the socialization things that we used to do. Those things aren’t cheap when you start with 50 students times $10 for this bill or $20 for this trip to Waynesborough to do the ropes course. We’ve stopped it because we’ve found,they’re like ‘we already know everybody.”
The best cure for those objections is success. Look for small successes early on in your campaign to demonstrate the value of your efforts. Additionally, having a good grasp on the analytics piece will show the team that you are not shooting in the dark. Once you remove these obstacles, early in your efforts, the rest of your efforts will be easier to sell to the rest of the team. This is critical to your success. We’ll talk more about this in the last chapter on organizational considerations.
As a result of Barbara’s success, she can now go straight to the core of the content she needs to be sharing with the new students. “You know, actual curriculum content,” she confirms.
“I tell ya, we really marvel at the savings and the ability to focus on the things that, I won’t say really matter but gives us a jump start on curriculum. It gives us a jump start on other orientation things that are specific to Mayo Clinic that they would not have been able to get.”
Clearly the Mayo Medical School now understands the value of Facebook and is now reaping the rewards of investing their time and energy into the platform. But it’s not enough to just know that it can benefit you or your organization. You have to plan accordingly, execute, measure and adjust. Without the analytics piece and a good dose of competence in this area you’re are really flying blind.
Today incoming students at the Mayo Media School have an established, coalesced group through Facebook before that arrive. Now, “things just work better. Things just work better because there’s not this awkwardness about ‘who are you?’ and ‘where did you come from?’ It’s like they’re already a family.”
This post is derived from a draft for "Facebook Marketing - An Hour A Day." I am writing it with Chris Treadaway for Wiley Press (Sybex). The release date is February 26, 2010. You can reserve your copy now if you like.
