Marketing spend these days is all about justification. I'm glad that the use of social media is quickly moving from "shiny object" darling to why should my business use it?
The latter is a much better question. One that will get us somewhere, not necessarily faster but more real. The ROI question pops up everywhere these days. I do wonder how do you measure your other business activities?
Do you measure marketing? Do you hold advertising accountable? Do you know what works, what doesn't? How about public relations? Finance? HR? IT? Any ROI calculations handy on those?
When we take a step back and make the time to figure out how we're going to measure what works and what doesn't - so we can tweak as needed - then we get on the way to providing a solid answer to the ROI question. Did you increase your lists? What about number of partnerships and deals?
If you know where you are today, you will know how far you've come tomorrow.
What's interesting is that many who started as bloggers in love with the space today are looking more and more like marketers - building and creating lists and data bases, and some even communities that are receptive to their products from their platforms.
Real time, really soon
These are the very early days of what we call the social Web.
The term will disappear as a distinct entity. Instead, we will simply think about sharing information and forging relationships online. The term "social media" will be an anachronism faster than we expect. The tools we use to conduct social media will become ubiquitous.
What is important are the concepts of attention and access.
The problem with social media as it is lies here: social media services (FB, Twitter, and dozens of others) atomize our attention. We're human: we can't go much further down this path.
Instead, we'll marry what we read, consume, and produce *directly* to the principles behind social media. The browser, desktops, and applications will all be seamless.
We'll share what we wish to and what we produce with those we choose. It will be real time, granular, and more automatic than it is today.
For now, I suggest that performance can and should be measured as part of a process along a continuum designed to expand reach, increase engagement, build influence, and request action on behalf of your business - with social media integrated in the communications mix.
At this point, pro bloggers and marketers are meeting somewhere in the middle. I believe there is plenty of room for deeper conversations on how the real time Web will pan out. It will be fodder for a future post.
What are your thoughts? Do we need to look at it from a totally different angle? If so, why?
© 2006-2009 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.
A very smart post. I agree that you can only go so far down the road when it comes to spending more and more time online. It's not the way to get results. It's never been about how much time you spend...it's about results.
I also agree that the line between "social media" and "media" and "real life" will continue to blur until it's completely integrated.
No business owner seeks to determine the monetary value of attending a social function. No one seeks to monetize a handshake, but we want to know the value of leaving comments on blogs, and we want to know the direct impact to our bottom line for every blog post we write. It's simply a matter of education. It's just gonna take a bit of time before people realize what we're doing online is what we've always been doing. Talking to each other. That's all this is.
Posted by: Christian Russell | December 01, 2009 at 10:11 AM
Awesome stuff... I wonder, though, how effective Dell is at measuring such soft metrics as "brand perception over time."
Posted by: Russ Henneberry | December 01, 2009 at 01:30 PM
@Christian - love that you continued with the metaphor in your comment. Well done! "Going down the road..." Social media exposes the lack of overall business strategy many companies have. They've been stuck in a what worked before model without even questioning if what they were doing were the right things in the first place.
@Russ - interesting that you would ask, we had a conversation about that with the team, given that I'm a brand/business strategist at the core. I think this warrants a follow up post, don't you? Meanwhile, you can look up what Avinash Kaishik already gave us for measuring increase in brand awareness here http://tinyurl.com/yds64tf - very concrete steps indeed.
Posted by: Valeria Maltoni | December 01, 2009 at 09:12 PM
You bring up some interesting points. When do speaking engagements on using social engagement as a way of marketing I get a lot of questions related to what you talk about, ROI of social media, the desire to be on every network with no plan, doing things because everyone else is, but most importantly, is this a fad?
I've always believed that the "shiny object" era would come to an end, and we might start seeing a drastic decline in the next year or two. I agree with the term social media marketing being irrelevant, it'll just be marketing. What will remain will be the way we think about one another, business to business, business to customer, customer to customer, and so on. It's those relationships that will be changed forever.
Thought the seamless integration aspect, while appealing, does not seem to something that will happen soon, or be adopted quickly. A lot of companies are spending time building empires in the social space on networks where entire communities are thriving. Having them switch gears outside of those networks will be like asking them to leave billboards and newspapers right now. Innovation has to happen no doubt, but I don't think social media marketing as we know it has truly developed enough to make that leap.
Posted by: Luis Sandoval Jr. | December 02, 2009 at 10:51 AM
Good point on the adoption of the seamless integration, Louis. Different people are involved with different parts of the process, and even if you have one person overseeing everyone, which you usually don't, they will each have their *own goals* and agendas.
It is the people that don't ask "how can we do this?" instead of "can we do this?"
Early days indeed!
Posted by: Valeria Maltoni | December 02, 2009 at 11:44 PM