Alternate title:
McFib?
Thanks to Mike Zavarello (@brightmatrix) for the #McFib suggestion. I wish I had thought of that.
Okay. This is not going to be a kind, warm and fuzzy post. Before I start, let me say this: I would much rather have a brilliant Social Media case study to champion. A story about a company doing something right, with data to back up its results, clean metrics to boot, and flawless analysys from start to finish. Wieden + Kennedy’s Old Spice campaign will soon be the subject of such a post, when more sales numbers are made available. But as things stand, this post is not going to be about a company that got things right.
What we are going to talk about today is either a case study in either poor journalism (did Mashable screw up the facts?), or the origin of questionable claims by McDonald’s about a Foursquare promotion’s alleged outcome.
Here is how the story begins (via Mashable):
At the Mobile Social Communications conference yesterday, [Rick] Wion shared that McDonald’s was able to increase foot traffic to stores by 33% in one day with a little Foursquare ingenuity. McDonald’s total cost for the successful campaign was a measly $1,000.
Econsultancy reports that McDonald’s, with Wion driving campaign direction and strategy, opted to try and take advantage of Foursquare Day (4/16) to bring in more business. The company used 100 randomly awarded $5 and $10 giftcards as checkin bait to lure in potential diners. The bait also worked to attract the media’s attention and resulted in more than 50 articles covering McDonald’s Foursquare special.
The campaign worked in both digital and real world capacities. Patrons flocked to McDonald’s restaurants for the chance to win giftcards in exchange for checkins, and 600,000 online denizens opted to follow and fan the brand on social media sites.
The Econsultancy piece is here. Sounds great, right? Here is what you just heard: McDonald’s spent $1,000 on a campaign, leveraged Foursquare to get people in the door, and increased foot traffic by 33%, resulting in some unknown but probably decent spike in business (sales.) Except no. That isn’t what happened. There’s also this:
Of course, the metric here was checkins (not sales), and there were likely several other factors contributing to the campaign’s success, but it’s still a story that many an agency should pay heed to.
Let me quote that again, in case you missed it:
“The metric here was checkins (not sales).” Or actual foot traffic, apparently.
Oh. Take the pig off the spit – the celebration might be a little premature. Right idea, wrong execution, and horrendous analysis. Let me explain.
1. In spite of its “conclusion,” did McDonald’s actually measure foot traffic?
This was a test. The premise was this: If we spend $1,000 on a Social Media promotion using Foursquare, can we get more people in stores? The most important metric to measure then, both as a baseline and an ultimate outcome would be what?
Foot traffic. Actual foot traffic. As in… someone with a clicker standing at the door, a laser in the door way recording how many times someone passes through it, or a sensor in the door recording how many times it opens and closes. Unfortunately, unless Mashable forgot to mention it, McDonald’s did not actually measure foot traffic.
Wait… what?
That’s right: Though Rick Wion claims to have increased foot traffic by 33%, nowhere does the piece mention that McDonald’s actually measured foot traffic. The only metric mentioned: Foursquare Check-ins.
The one thing McDonald’s should have measured, the very metric Rick Wion is reporting jumped by 33% in one day is the one metric that may not in fact have been measured at all.
How did McDonald’s come up with the 33% figure then? Good question.
Here is how you measure deltas/changes in foot traffic: 1. Lock in your baseline (the average daily foot traffic before the campaign). 2. Measure average daily foot traffic during your campaign. 3. Compare the two.
Measure actual people actually walking into actual stores. Not checking-in from their phones three blocks away, not clicking a “like” button on Facebook from their desk, not clicking “follow” on their twitterberry. People in the stores.
If McDonald’s wants to report on a win, it should be this: “With only $1,000 investment, we increased Foursquare check-ins by x%.”
I now leave Ronald McDonald’s Social Media team and Rick Wion to explain to the board of directors how exactly this helps the business, or how they plan to build on that to generate actual results… Or where that convenient 33% figure actually came from.
Rick can you explain this to me? I’m not clear on how you came up with that 33% increase in foot traffic. Did Mashable mess up stating that the metric was “check-ins” rather than sales (or the omitted foot traffic itself)? Did you actually measure foot traffic? Do you have a net number of in-store visitors for that day vs. a normal day? If you do, I will gladly write another post to praise your success on this point. If not, something fishy is going on with both your methodology and your conclusions.
2. Metrics are not randomly interchangeable:
Here’s a simple, basic, no BS fact of Social Media performance measurement: A Foursquare check-in is not foot traffic. Foot traffic is not a Foursquare check-in. Here is the difference between the two:
- Foot traffic is someone coming into your store.
- A Foursquare check-in is someone within five city blocks of your store pushing a button on their phone.
Case in point:
@lizy_dee: I just checked in to some McDonalds up the road while I’m sitting on my couch at home.. #fail
Likewise, mentions are not sales, and new followers aren’t new customers. Metrics are not randomly interchangeable. Metrics are specific. Don’t measure one thing and magically turn it into another to embellish your quarterly report and get some media attention.
3. Contests are not strategies. People will do anything for free stuff and then move on:
“Do this and you might win something. One day only!” Here, McDonald’s has at its disposal the combined power of the Social Web and mobile phones, with a potential reach of hundreds of millions of people. It has a chance to increase net new customers, increase customer loyalty, earn mind-share, impact preferences and customer habits in the long term… But no. McDonald’s big Social Media idea is to attach the typical one-day-only contest carrot – which requires neither Foursquare nor Social Media of any sort – to get people into its stores for one day.
(Oh wait… we don’t know if it actually got people into their stores, do we? Did McDonald’s measure that?)
A one-day-only contest carrot? That’s it? That is your Social Media team’s strategy, McDonald’s? We’re still running 3rd grade plays at this point? Really? What happened the next day? Did you have to give out more gift cards too?
But McDonald’s, I will give you this: You did prove that promotions in which people might win free stuff will get people to click on buttons, register, and perhaps even go to your stores. Unfortunately, we already knew that.
Tying Foursquare check-ins to a promotion the way you did doesn’t prove that Foursquare will work for you, or that you know how to leverage it yet. Foursquare is a button people push to get their prize, not the reason why they came to your store. Let me illustrate:
Replace the term “Foursquare check-in” with “funny hat”.
If your promotion had asked people to wear a funny hat to your stores for a chance to win a gift card, would you be saying that funny hats helped you generate 33% in additional foot traffic? Here’s an example:
At the Mobile Social Communications conference yesterday, [Rick] Wion shared that McDonald’s was able to increase foot traffic to stores by 33% in one day with a little funny hat ingenuity. McDonald’s total cost for the successful campaign was a measly $1,000.
The company used 100 randomly awarded $5 and $10 giftcards as checkin bait to lure in potential diners. The bait also worked to attract the media’s attention and resulted in more than 50 articles covering McDonald’s funny hat special.
Patrons flocked to McDonald’s restaurants for the chance to win giftcards in exchange for wearing funny hats.
See what I mean? What’s your Foursquare strategy again? Is it the same as your funny hat strategy or your pink tie strategy or your flip-flop strategy?
Here’s a little dose of reality: This was a promotion just like every other promotion before it. Come in, give us the secret handshake, and maybe win something. Foursquare was an accessory, not the catalyst. Even if McDonald’s had actually seen a 33% increase in visits to their restaurants on that day, the gift card promotion, not Foursquare, got people to participate.
4. “It’s still a story that many an agency should pay heed to.” Um, no. Absolutely not.
Unless what you want to do is teach agencies that not measuring relevant campaign outcomes, mistaking one metric for another, making up numbers entirely, not understanding basic Social Media marketing strategy and having no clue how to tie campaign metrics to business metrics is the right path.
There is already plenty of that going on on. We need less of it, not more.
5. Take your case studies seriously: McDonald’s should have measured conversions. Here’s how to do it:
What Rick Wion and his team should have done:
600,000 new fans and followers? That’s “Reach.” That’s your starting point. Here’s your conversion chart:
Reach → Response → Visits → Foursquare Check-ins → Transactions → Revenue (then repeat)
Don’t know how to put these things together? It’s simple:
Reach, we’ve already touched on.
Responses can be anything from RSVPs on Facebook, to registrations or sign-ups on a microsite, to mentions to RTs on Twitter.
Visits are your first real measurable conversion. You actually have to count visitors. Not estimate but count. If the suggestions I made earlier in the post are not feasible, look into software that will allow you to count visitors by analyzing your CCTV feeds. (Your surveillance cameras capture foot traffic in and out of the store, and to the cash register. Put them to good use.)
Foursquare Check-ins are simple. By the way, since these check-ins have location data, you do realize that you can map check-ins nationally and therefore assign check-in volume to specific stores, right? So, you can see what areas are responding well to your campaign, and what areas are not? In terms of targeting, this is gold. I hope McDonald’s Social Media team is paying attention. Rick, your team knows how to do this, right?
Transactions are pretty basic. Now that you have your foot traffic data, not only nation-wide but also per individual store, you can see store by store what the deltas/changes are. Now that you also have Foursquare check-in data store-by store, you can overlay that data with your foot traffic data. This gives you a nice composite of increased foot traffic per store + volume of check-ins per store. See where I am going with this? Okay, now, the last bit of data: Look at the volume of net transactions per store next to these two metrics. What you are looking for is this: Stores in which foot traffic, foursquare check-ins and net transactions rose together. This is where you begin to see the path from action to reaction to R.O.I.
Revenue is the final metric you need to calculate the R.O.I. of your $1,000 campaign. You’ve already looked at foot traffic, check-ins and net transactions. The “net new” numbers in the data set that show an increase in all 3 is where you can PROVE that your activity had an impact on business performance. There are several ways of assigning a dollar value to your campaign’s net gain, but the fastest is to calculate the corresponding percentage of net $revenue to the percentage of net new transactions in that data set. This is your hard number: The 100% unquestionable net gain (in revenue) from your investment. If your campaign cost $1,000, you can now prove that revenue generated that day by your campaign was $x. With this data, you can present the board (and the general public) with a real case study. One with an actual process, proper measurement, and measurable facts including R.O.I.
Behind closed doors, you can also look at collateral outcomes: Those you suspect but cannot prove 100%. This would be an increase in sales revenue that can be attributed to increased foot traffic, but not Foursquare check-ins, for example.
That is how it is done, McDonald’s.
Note: The campaign’s cost was not merely $1,000. Also factor in the salaries of McDonald’s Social Media team, the equipment they use, the software they use, the training they have received, the conferences they attend, and other costs associated with their “management” of this campaign to get a more accurate value.
6. Mashable, when someone hands you a cup of Koolaid, check it before drinking it.
Mashable, I love you. I really do. If you were a person, I would hang out with you a lot. In a way, we already do. And it is because I love you that I have to tell you to be careful: You’re the popular kid in the class who can help make reputations. If you like someone, suddenly everyone likes them too. You can make nerds popular with a mere wave of your magic wand. That makes you a target for clever PR people with a story to sell and the talent to sucker you in. Usually, you smell what’s cooking. This time, I think you jumped too soon on the opportunity for a scoop. And yeah, your traffic is pretty solid. You’re going to be generating a lot of advertising dollars from this McDonald’s story. But you didn’t have to buy into it hook, line and sinker:
“Foursquare ingenuity” – Except it wasn’t. There was nothing ingenious about the campaign or its use of Foursquare, not to mention that the measurement piece is a disaster.
“the successful campaign” – No.
“netted the company measurable success” – No again.
“Patrons flocked to McDonald’s restaurants” – Nicely written, but still no. Is there proof of flocking?
Or is it that you were so impressed with what you heard that you forgot to mention the other metrics used by McDonald’s? Metrics like… actual foot traffic? Or transactions? Anything that might back up Rick’s assertion that foot traffic increased by 33% on Foursquare Day? If McDonald’s has this data and you failed to report it, (even going as far as to say that “the metric” was Foursquare check-ins), you just made Rick look bad.
Whatever the case may be, Mashable, you can do better than this.
What can we learn from this? Several things:
1. With many companies desperate for a Social Media win, questionable “case studies” like this one are bound to start popping up at conferences and on sites like Mashable with increasing regularity.
2. Social Media Directors with little understanding of the space in terms of strategy, program development, Social Business planning, program integration, program management and performance measurement are still the norm. (This will be the topic of my next post.) This may or may not be the case with Rick Wion. I don’t know that yet.
3. What this kind of story illustrates is this: When few people understand how to leverage the Social Web to create specific business outcomes and measure them properly, Social Media “experts” can make a complete fiasco of a campaign sound like a Social Media knockout victory with a few carefully selected words.
4. Headlines and anecdotal “evidence” are so easily consumed that facts tend to get lost in the PR copy, and trusted sources don’t always understand their subject enough to spot red flags. Even eConsultancy and Mashable are vulnerable.
5. A tough job market for Marketing professionals, the promise of fame, influence and perhaps a book deal, and little understanding of proper Social Media measurement from the C-suite combine to create the perfect environment for less than qualified individuals to pose as qualified Social Media Directors.
Many companies have them in their midst and have no idea that their Social Media experiment has been put in the hands of someone with absolutely no idea what they are doing. Whether the McDonald’s/Foursquare experiment turns out to be the result of poor methodology or poor reporting by Mashable and eConsultancy is still unclear, but it does illustrate the danger of operating in a medium that so few executives, marketers and journalists understand. My inbox and DM column are full of questions from “Social Media Directors” and VPs who pass themselves off as experts yet show a disturbing lack of even basic Social Media knowledge. Just because someone’s job title is “Social Media Director” doesn’t mean they even know how people use Twitter. (I am not exaggerating.) The fact that I still have to explain R.O.I. to Social Media “experts” is also indicative of the gap between “perceived” knowledge in the industry and “actual” knowledge in the industry. Someone’s job title does not guarantee their expertise, especially in this field.
This is the kind of BS that drives me ba. na. nas.
McDonald’s, I invite you to share your foot traffic data if you have it. Nothing would make me happier than to find out that this was all just one big misunderstanding.
Filed under: account planning, ROI, Social Communications, social media Tagged: brandbuilder, foot traffic, foursquare, Mashable, McDonald's, measurement, metric, olivier blanchard, R.O.I., revenue, Rick Wion, ROI, social media, success, transactions 
No comments:
Post a Comment