Chris Osborne

Chris is Senior Vice President, Strategy & Technology at Totem, where he is responsible for all marketing strategy and technology for Totem’s clients. Chris is part of the executive team, jointly responsible for setting and delivering on Totem’s strategic direction and financial goals. Totem creates content based marketing programs for organizations across North America including Proctor & Gamble, The Home Depot, Sears, Acura, Bank of America, Sobeys, Aeroplan and many others.

Chris has over 15 years of business experience at Bank of Montreal, Exchange Solutions and Redwood. He holds a Master’s degree in Economics and attended Queen’s University Business School. Chris provides marketing strategy and technology expertise for major corporations across many vertical industries including retail, financial services, automotive, and pharmaceutical.

Putting the M in Social Media

There are over 400MM Facebook users, Forrester estimating social media marketing spend to surpass email by 2013 and Nike Football has 11MM views on the their youtube video, so far. There is no lack of examples of how prevalent social media has become yet we need to remember that it is no different than any other media; we’re investing hard dollars and we need to understand how it is contributing to our bottom line and establish formal benchmarks of measurement like we have for all other media.

However, social media is new, and like anything new (think email or the web 10 years ago) we have to experiment and figure out how to properly measure it, what the agreed upon metrics and benchmarks are and how it drive sales.

But one thing is certain; we have more data, not less, and this data tracks the impact social media has on our behaviour as we interact with content, media, advertising and each other. It can track our awareness of brands, how we have conversations and about what, how we feel, give information, on how we connect you to each other, not to mention how much time we spend on various social networks. All of these behaviours are measured in the social media world, quickly and effectively, without the use of expensive market research. The new data streams created allow us to see far deeper into consumer behaviour than ever before; further before and after the actual transaction. While measuring social media has quickly become highly complex, there is a wealth of data we can leverage. We have data on pre-transactions such as sentiment analysis and assessing brand conversations, we have data on post-transaction behaviour such as word of mouth, good or bad. We can see how many people are talking about our brand (on Facebook), how many like to follow what we talk about (on Twitter) or how many are advocating us (with share tools).

There has been a lot of discussion of ROI of social media, it’s important to remember that ROI is a financial measurement, not a media measurement. Our focus needs to be on using the data being created more, understanding industry benchmarks, understanding the relation ship between these new data points and the financial impact they have by driving purchase and loyalty. Remember, we can now hear the conversations consumers are having about our brands, let’s listen and understand how that helps us do better business.

Chris Osborne