There are 100 opinions on what percentage of social media should be in your 2011 marketing mix, but across every industry there’s one unified call for quantifiable ROI.
We marketers know that Return on Investment and Return on Information depend on a company’s goals. While it may be difficult to measure the short-term effectiveness of a Twitter campaign in profitability terms (ROI), it’s no excuse not to pursue an initiative or forego measurements.
Do you know the ROI of the ad on the bus bench? Or four hours on the golf course with a CEO, or the in-flight magazine ad?
One of the most valuable ROIs for me in social media is knowledge—first-person, firsthand, first to apply.
Access to a primary source of information, which is in turn applied to a social media initiative, is a business advantage. And it’s one of the most valuable benefits of attending a social media conference like Ragan’s 4th Annual Social Media for PR & Corporate Communications in Las Vegas.
During three days of social media on steroids, 400 colleagues and I learned from frontline practitioners who are opening up media frontiers for business. Shel Holtz (@ShelHoltz), Pete Codella (@Codella), David Pogue (@Pogue), Col. Doug Wheelock from NASA (@Astro_Wheels), Lt. Colonel Andrew Morton (@MyArmyReserve), Paolo Tosolini (@tosolini), and Mark Ragan (@MarkRaganCEO) were just a few of the leaders.
Teaching an advanced social media strategies session, David B. Thomas (@DavidBThomas), author of The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy, and executive director of New Marketing Labs, shared practical advice on social media and measurement.
I caught up with David after his Ragan session and asked him, “How do you see social media changing the marketing mix?” His insight may be the tipping point to make 2011 the year to shift some marketing dollars from traditional to new media.
The highest ROI for social media marketing will come when it’s integral to the marketing strategy—not a stepsister to marketing and communications.
How do you begin to incorporate social media into your marketing? Start with these 5 essentials gleaned from David Thomas’s session:
1. Build a marketing strategy—social media is a set of tools and a philosophy of communication, not a strategy.
2. Define success—is your goal to drive traffic to your website, increase registrations, secure media interest, pre-sell cars, pipe the web with your content (David Thomas calls this Google Juice!)?
3. Choose your tools—institutional or external blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr.
4. Monitor the conversations—begin with Google Analytics and don’t discount your own employees as competitive intelligence agents—the eyes and ears of the company. Even powerful and expensive monitoring tools can’t monitor Facebook wall posts or email conversations, but your employees and friends can.
5. Measure success—review the website analytics, search for mentions, listen to who’s talking and buying and influencing. Analyze failures as well as successes.
How is your company putting dollars behind social media strategy in 2011? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Anne D Gallaher