When he launched the online storefront application Shopify.com, Mr. Lake relied on blogs and other social media tools to get the word out. While successful, it was difficult to accurately measure the results – and returns – of the different campaigns.
Out of that challenge came SWIX, a tool for not only measuring the success of a social media marketing effort, but also a company’s return on investment.
Like Google Analytics, SWIX provides users with a “dashboard” showing different engagement measurements, such as how many times someone clicked on a link published through Twitter and how many times that link was retweeted.
However, Mr. Lake plans to take the analytics model further and calculate a social marketer’s return on investment. This can be done by, for example, inputting the cost of creating a YouTube video and calculating how much one is paying per view, or by measuring how much web traffic was directed to a company’s landing page through social media property it controls.
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The beta version of SWIX was launched roughly four weeks ago. The company’s target client base is made up of businesses that market themselves online, as well as marketing firms involved in social media campaigns that can sell the reports generated by SWIX as part of their service packages.
It’s a market that barely existed only a few years ago and for Mr. Lake, that’s part of the fun.
“We get to define an industry that is in its infancy.” - CEO Scott Lake
“We’re doing something that no one else has done before ... It’s very rare in your life that you get the chance to tap into something right at the beginning,” he says.
“Social media marketing, and marketing online, is eventually going to be the primary way we are going to make buying decisions for products, services and brands.”
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Year founded: 2008
Local head count: 3
Funding to date: Multiple angels, approximately $250,000
Product: Social media marketing analytics
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