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.

Industry Expert vs. Functional Expert for Out-of-Box Thinking

I was talking with several people about hiring the right people for their marketing roles. It seems that hiring processes have either encouraged inflexibility or laziness, with poor results. The crux of the topic can be boiled down to two key statements:

1. Most HR departments have a rigid experience requirement, such as 10+ years experience, to insure market familiarity
2. Resulting hires tend to want to do things the way they've been done for 10+ years, often with mediocre results, though not necessarily horrible results.

I once heard that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same results. I don't think these HR people were insane, so is there anything unexpected going on here? If you do something for 10 or more years, you learn the traditions of a  business. Traditions and network matter, especially for well established and long lived business. On one extreme, I worked for Pacific Bell, they gave me an 11 page document that only had acronyms that I was required knowledge for the business. At the same time, those traditions can lead to stagnation and a lack of innovation. You may often hear the phrase "but that's how we've always done it" when any type of change is introduced.

One CEO I spoke with made an interesting comment: "While the staff and even executives are hired with the industry experience requirement, look at how CEOs are hired". That's an interesting point.

• In energy, telecom, steel, semiconductors, and banking, you see CEOs almost always coming from within the exact same industry. 
• In other technology, you may see CEOs, valued for functional experience, cross over to another technology area. Meg Whitman moving from eBay to HP and Eric Schmidt going from Novell to Google come to mind.

Another CEO told me that HR departments can be either overwhelmed or lazy, leaving them to fall back on what's easy. He said that while some industry experience is indispensable, once a minimum threshold is met, the company culture, position goals, market culture, and personal attributes become more important.

I've seen some recruiters who get it. One told me that in Finance, you often see people jumping from industry to industry all the time. Their functional expertise helps them understand and approach a variety of financial situations. Financing, deal making, and money management constantly changes, and once someone has the minimum industry understanding, their ability to creatively solve problems is paramount since the old ways may not work.

The same should apply to sales and marketing. Great sales and marketing people understand that people, markets, and situations change. It's often a good idea to NOT do the same thing you've done for 10 years or even 5 years, as the market, people, and buying behaviors have changed.

How do you hire? Do you fill a position or hire a functional leader?