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Nielsen and Facebook recently announced an alliance to help better define the return on investment in marketing activities on Facebook. The first product to be offered, BrandLift, will present brief surveys to users to help measure aided awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability and purchase consideration resulting from ads on Facebook.

It’s exciting to see this next step in the evolution of social media and its impact on the business world. Marketers will now be able to begin to quantify the return associated with online advertising on one of the most pervasive sites around. According to Nielsen, in August 2009, Facebook had the most time per user spent on the site among the top Web brands, with an average of 5 hours 46 minutes 4 seconds.

As communicators, we’re often challenged to define ways to measure the impact of our programs and even harder stretched to measure a concrete return on investment. That’s especially true with internally focused programs. We’re often faced with questions like:

Do employees really care about reading an executive’s blog? Does it really help the leader become more visible and “real” to employees?

Will a revamped intranet actually improve employee productivity?

Do online discussion forums and other collaboration tools actually help improve employee engagement?

Though not necessarily the “holy grail” of measurement, tools like BrandLift represent the beginning of a more scientific approach to measuring the real value of marketing and communications in the world of social media. As these tools become more common, we as communicators will have much more of an opportunity to begin proving the relative value of our online tactics both internally and externally.

Tags: BrandLift, facebook, measurement, Nielsen, social media

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Business and social trends, Uncategorized, employee communications reflections, technology, tools and techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.