We see this all the time with our customers and our own efforts, but it’s nice to see it validated in the wider world, too:

not only can inbound marketing bring leads for less money but it can also double average monthly leads for small and medium-sized businesses. Creating a community of followers through Twitter and a regularly updated stream of content on a blog builds engagement, boosts the company’s presence on Google and ultimately bring in more potential customers.

via Small Biz Lead Gen Surges with Social - eMarketer.

Social media marketing is all about word-of-mouth marketing. Well, OK, not “all about”, but word of mouth is a big part of the social media marketing equation. So I was interested in this latest from McKinsey and Co., claiming a new way to measure the value of word of mouth marketing:

To assess the impact of these different kinds of recommendations, we developed a way to calculate what we call word-of-mouth equity. It represents the average sales impact of a brand message multiplied by the number of word-of-mouth messages. By looking at the impact—as well as the volume—of these messages, this metric lets a marketer accurately test their effect on sales and market share for brands, individual campaigns, and companies as a whole Exhibit 2.

Buried in the consultant-speak are some good points about the value of social media and you might even be able to extract a specific metric or two from this if you thought long and hard about it. But metrics are only really as good as their track-ability and I’m not sure how we track any of this.

Your thoughts?

via A new way to measure word-of-mouth marketing - McKinsey Quarterly - Marketing - Strategy.