Social Media ROI

People keep discussing this subject, yes or no, is there a measurable ROI on your social media activities.
Can you measure the effect? Yes.
Is there a concrete ROI? Sometimes yes, most of the time (RIGHT NOW!) no. But I have no doubt in the world that within a year or two most businesses will see a clear ROI on their SM efforts.
The main problem at the moment I think is that most companies don´t really know what they´re doing, and why they´re doing it. Their competitor is in SM so they should be too, and so the friend of the cousin of the owner has a FB page so he can do it right?

Lets be frank, with this approach, it will be almost impossible to have any ROI, simply because you don´t know what you´re measuring and what to benchmark against.

A clear example of Social Media resulting in cost savings is when it´s used as customer service. Reduction in call center activity is absolutely a proven fact.
Media impressions (Burger King), increased product awareness (Ford Fiesta), physical sales through Twitter or through F-Commerce (DELL) are some other examples of Social Media ROI.
Sure these are big businesses with a large existing community. If you are a smaller company you will need to have lots of patience and think long term.

But still the situation is what it is. Most companies are not investing appropriately and by no means should they - when they don´t know where, how and why.

Education is one important part of this. Try and fail is another.
Companies looking for 10 years of experience in their social media person will have a hard time finding that person, simply because we are all relatively new in this area. But make no mistake, there is a HUGE difference in hiring a "community manager" who knows or do doesn´t know.
First thing ALWAYS have to be about listening. Companies talk to much. Find influensers, people who have a large following and who represents trust. If you can manage to enter into the Trustosphere you have a huge advantage.
Credible people within your area might wanna guest blog for you? That creates an added value for the client which is the ultimate goal here. We have to offer something extra, some reason for a person to come back to our Facebook page or website. More than 80% of the people never return to a fan page after they have pushed the like button.

Evaluating where is the customer. On Facebook? Blogs? Twitter? Is he/she a video consumer? Then comes the Goals. How much money can we save on customer service? How much can we increase sales through online activities? Can we increase the average size order or build more loyalty among our customers? Can we build awareness about our product through a cool application on Facebook or create momentum around an event through a live Twitter chat?
Then comes the planning... Much much later comes the actual posts on Facebook, Blogs or Twitter...
No ONE strategy fits every company. The ROI has to be evaluated case by case.

A lot of the information in this video is not new anymore but I found it good anyway.

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How To Set Up A Foursquare Special

This article maps out the exact steps to set up a Foursquare Special. This is easy and free. Do you have a venue, a store, a product in a physical location? Do you want to reward new customers or encourage existing clients to return by building loyalty? Jump on this train NOW!

http://mashable.com/2011/05/09/foursquare-special/

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Present The Deals Where The Customer Is

I got 3 emails from Groupon yesterday and one from Groupalia. Honestly it's just too much. Love the service but 4 emails in one day, with offers that I only found half interesting... I'm not sold, I will unsubscribe tomorrow morning or at least see if I can limit them to send me one weekly email with the latest offers.

This all comes back to what I have been saying before. The Facebook newsfeed is the best thing ever invented. Will Groupon make me visit their site? I doubt it, so their only way to present me the deals is through emails.
Will a check-in Location Based Service such as Foursquare make me visit them, yes. Why? Because it's easy through their mobile app. Why doesn't Groupon have an app?
Isn't all tech services and products about making life easier for the customer these days? Camera, MP3 player and phone in one, home cinemas with internet connections, GPS in the mobile...
The thought of not having to leave Facebook is pretty comfortable to me. If I can get my deals straight from there, why spend 10 minutes going through emails with offers from Groupon, Gowalla or any other service for that matter?
Facebook seems to focus on social experiences. Maybe this is what will differentiate them from other deal services. Maybe I will go to Groupon for a discount on a new iMac, or a discount on a restaurant but will stay on Facebook to know the latest deals on the new movie that opens next week or what's the exclusive barbeque party all about.
It's not clear though, almost all the deals I have received from Groupon so far have been experiences too. Even though some of them did sound interesting, the adventure rafting for examples, Groupon misses out on the interaction part. I can't see if any of my friends are talking about this experience, I can't discuss is easily just by clicking share and instantaneously have ALL of my network right there.

This interview is with Emily White, Senior of Local at Facebook. She explains the concept well and it's worth reading.

Two things she said:

“Let’s create something that really takes advantage of normal human behavior, and at the same time is really good for businesses”

“We’re really going for ease of use,” White said. “You’re able to discover a deal in your News Feed rather than go through 10 new daily deal emails. We’re adding value or actually your friends are adding value. Credits are the same way. It’s not about pushing Credits.”

To read the full interview Click here!Tweet

Obtaining Tangible Value

Yesterday I attended my first session of the Social Media Success Summit. The session was called Finding and Engaging Your Target Audience With Social Media and Brian Solis was the speaker.
The session was absolutely fantastic. Clear simple information that once spoken seems so ridiculously obvious but it's just not to many brands.

First part of the session was about how brands think about social media and their customers.
23% of people go to social media platforms to interact with brands. 77% for other reasons.

Brand: 

"Customer connect with us on FB and Twitter because they want to learn about new products"

"Customer connect with us because they want information"

"Customer want us to engage with them to create a community"

Customer:

"I actually just want discounts and offers! In fact I just don't want it once like you tricked me to like you at the first place. I'm connecting to you because I want something NOW and over time. Also I want you to acknowledge my problems and solve my issues."

What are we looking at here? A MAJOR gap in between what brands think customer want, and what the customers actually want. There is a huge disconnection here!

This is fascinating information and means a HUGE opportunity for brands. Facebook itself is not saturated at all, Bad marketing is. The unsubscription rate is growing every day. People are breaking up with brands more and more. Why? 

Customer:

1. I was bombarded with marketing messages and it clogged up my wall

2. I didn't get any discounts and offers

What's it about then and how does this change our social strategies? For one thing I think so many brands are on Facebook and Twitter "Just cus they think they have to". Just "To be there". Many of them not understanding neither the reason, the purpose and the opportunity. 

It's about designing our content strategies and engagement programs around what the customer wants.

How? Start by listening. Gather intelligence. Or ASK the customer.

The 5 I's of Social Media marketing:

Intelligence leads to Insight which leads to Ideas and those ideas lead to Interaction which hopefully leads to Influencing customers.

There has to be tangible value in between the customer and client and we find that by listening to what customers want and then we deliver that value.

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Social Media Ad Spending To Hit $8.3B in 2015

Social media ad spending will hit $8.3 billion in 2015! Read more below.


http://mashable.com/2011/05/03/social-media-ad-spending-8b/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29Tweet

ThruSocial Facilitates Page Creation

Location Based Services, Social Deals and Mobile Marketing are probably the 3 things that interest me the most at the moment in the social media world.

Facebook Deals and Groupon offer companies the creation and mega distribution of deals. Deals that make people buy, that eventually increases sales.
Location Based Services also work well to increase sales but more I would locate this one in the Increase Brand Awareness bucket.

In the past I´ve looked to Wildfire when it comes to promotion apps. But they now also offers Group Deals.

Thrusocial is a new company that offers pre-paid coupons and a drag and drop page tab creation service,  all of this seems great. Please watch the video below and this article that includes more info.

Facebook Page Admins Can Offer Pre-Paid Deals Directly With ThruSocial and FaceItPages

However I must still say that the single most powerful thing of Facebook still is the newsfeed and the access to that makes a world of difference.  Groupon offers a massive distribution.

From a first look at this it seems like a good option for smaller businesses wanting to try out the world of group deals.

Further more I must mention that Thrusocial offers a kind of a promotion center called Thrupons where a company´s promotion can live and get updated automatically to the brand´s facebook page. NOTE! Seems this is U.S based so far cus when I entered my Barcelona zipcode I was asked if I wanted deals from New York. 

Anyway, this is something to keep your eyes on for sure...

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Social Media Check List

I have my "Social Media Check-List". A list that I have handy whenever I talk to a company who's thinking about stepping into the world of social media. I use it in the beginning of a project, to get all the info I need to be able to execute the job as great as possible.

Without answers to these questions, social media is simply something a company wanna join just because the think they need to. Not really understanding why or how.

So lets start with the more strategical list that was posted in this article Social Media Measurement: Moving forward with the data and tools at hand

Is my organization and my executive management team ready for social media marketing and branding?
Does everyone treat social media as a strategic effort or as an offshoot of marketing or PR/communications?
Where in the organization will social media reside?
Will I be able to allocate sufficient budget to social media efforts in our company?
How will social media discipline be aligned with HR, Technology, Customer Service, Sales, etc.?
What tools and technologies will I need to implement social media campaigns?
Will ‘social’ also include ‘mobile’?
How will we integrated SoMe marketing campaigns with existing, more ‘traditional’ marketing efforts?
How much organizational training will we need to implement in integrating ‘social’ within our enterprise?
Are we going to use ‘social’ for advertising and PR/Communications? What about ‘disaster recovery’ and ‘reputation management’?

My list falls under the different categories: Goals, Policies, Products, Platforms, Content, Content Flow, Promotions and Legal.

Goals is a pretty obvious one, don't need to go into details there. Under policies fall for example Time limits to response and company tone.


Under Product falls Product priority, product managers and new launches.


Platforms include things like who's admin for what platform, how to create a post-schedule and how to differentiate content for different platforms.


Under Content and Content flow I've put what content is available, what department owns what content, contact people and who approves what type of content.


Legal includes all those aspects that touch the legal issues, client confidentiality, how to treat personal information such as email databases e.t.c...

These are must-have's for any company who's serious about growing a profitable good working social media organization.Tweet