Social Media: tools, costs, impact, ROE, and ROI

There are so many experts telling you what to do and how to spend your time/money on social media, so I was happy to see a presentation from a knowledgeable colleague. In it, he reviewed several key issues surrounding social media: tools, costs, impact, and ROI. While the presentation is on the long side, it's a good read.

Cost Effective Social Media Measurement from geoff sharp

If you are strapped for time I recommend leaping forward to page 34 using the slide control, as that provides a case study with a quick view into a way to look at and evaluate social media efforts.

One reason this presentation appeals to me is that it attempts to define a closed loop approach to measurement and recommendations. Using initial or preliminary goals, I can look at the analysis and reports to see how I'm progressing toward those goals by choosing and analyzing a few key metrics. Over time, as I progress toward my goals or fail to reach them, the measurement allows me to re-evaluate my choice of metrics as key indicators of goal progress or even redefine my goals or sub-goals based on what resources I can apply to the process.

The key to this approach, however, is to have goals. These goals can be simple or complex, and can be co-mingled with costs, for example:

• Simply have or expand a social media presence
• Create market awareness and findability
• Create the largest social media footprint without advertising
• Create the largest social media footprint with a limited ad budget
• Use social media to drive sales
• Use social media to establish thought leadership
• Drive sign-ups to your service

Each of those goals is valid depending on your business needs and stage of business, and each has implications on both ROE (return on effort) as well as ROI (Return on Investment).  Pursuit of any of the individual goals alone or in combination has implications in terms of pre-requisites, resource allocation, and budget, which then translate to identifying which metrics you track on the way to your goal.

So, what is your goal, and how will you know when you get there?

Disclaimer: I know the creator of the presentation and have been an advocate of his measurement and ROI centric approach. Funny how I agree with it, no?

Market Camp Silicon Valley

At the first marketing camp unconference in SV and it's good place to be. It was terrible to wake up in the 7am hour on Saturday, but the sheer number of people here sacrificing their Saturday represents both personal commitment and possible productivity pain.

I think this could be a great thematic direction for SVForum, as this was the first large scale marketing conference that I've seen where the egos were secondary to the learning. Like the unconferences for hacking and technology, this featured directed topics, lots of discussions, and Q&A. This was the place to learn what's on people's mind: What do marketing people think and worry about? What marketing issues are top of mind?

As a problem solver, it was fascinating to see what people consistently had questions about. What did I gather was the major direction? Marketing people, or at least people tasked with marketing, are saddled with tactical issues. Several of the sessions had topics covering strategy and planning, but most were limited by the generic for of "How do I do X" or why are things changing?

The undertone is that business is changing. Many of the "How To" questions were based on several areas that I followed:
- How do I best use Twitter?
- How do I best use Facebook?
- How do I measure return on effort and return on investment?
- How do I grow (users, engagement, customers, etc)

If I could take one thing away from this conference, marketing automation and the training around it is really solving problems. This particular audience seemed more tailored to startups, small business, and consultants, so the defacto vendor mentioned over and over again was hubspot. One caution here - several people stated that while hubspot was good to start, it was painful to leave.

I'll be looking for the final slides here.