"Creating a Measurable Social Media Marketing Strategy for Hokey Pokey: Increasing the Value and ROI of Intangibles & Tangibles" by V. Kumar, Georgia State University, Vikram Bhaskaran, Georgia State University, Rohan Mirchandani, University of Pennsylvania, Milap Shah, Hokey Pokey.

This work focuses on how Hokey Pokey, a super-premium ice-cream retailer with over a dozen outlets deployed social media to enhance its growth and profitability. Hokey Pokey offers “customized mix-in” flavors, which the firm thought customer-developers could share using incentives and social media. They developed a model and measurement approach to link social media measures such as “comments” and “conversations” to financial metrics. They then developed a field test to evaluate the effectiveness of social media using their approach and found, among other effects, that the social media campaign lead to an increase in sales revenue growth of 40%, a 33-fold increase in the number of positive word of mouth instances, a 49% growth in brand awareness and an 83% ROI on the social media campaign.