Measuring Social Media Values in Sponsorship 2

Last week, I had an overwhelmingly positive response to the commentary on social media valuation for the sponsorship industry. Those who emailed me directly or posted comments were excited about the availability of social media metrics for valuation within sponsorships. Many had struggled with this process and are pleased to discover that such qualified metrics are now available form one of Canada's leading and most trusted sponsorship consultancies.

The first step in valuation of any element of a sponsorship property is to identify what that property has to sell. The Partnership Group - Sponsorship Specialists™ can now deliver this specifically for social media as well as the typical and historic inventory asset identification process. Our team now reviews in detail for each of our clients who engage us for this work the areas applicable to that property as they may be using social media, but also where they may be missing opportunities in saleable assets within social media. Areas of review are the web site, email marketing, Twitter Community, Facebook Community, Pinterest Community, LinkedIn profile, Geolocation Checkins, Quora, Fickr, Google, YouTube, and others. In each of these areas, we drill down to build or review as many as over 60 different identifiable assets.

Once the assets have been identified, we can place real market sponsorship value on each. These same metrics are also used for our corporate brand clients who engage us to help them determine the social media valuation of their sponsorship agreements and how to activate on them. The metrics developed include individual proprietary valuations for each asset based on research from fundraising community metrics, accounting industry metrics, corporate sponsors, sponsorship selling properties, and non-sponsorship industry research and collaboration. In addition, we utilize Hootsuite to identify and value assets to be valued against our metrics as well as Klout score. This comprehensive process is benchmarked against other properties and our team then conducts an overall review. Like our traditional IAV process, this is truly a three-step undertaking from industry accepted formulae, benchmarking, and comparables and experience reviews. As with any dynamic industry, these metrics and formulae will continue to evolve as new forms of external measurement are developed as well as new and innovative social media communities are developed and embraced. Our industry is vibrant on its own. The social media industry moves at lightning speed. These two entities will continue to advance together and we look forward to embracing that development with our clients' best interests first and foremost in mind.

Brent Barootes