Here I sit on another flight back to Dallas, and I just finished my movie. What’s the best way to spend the rest of the “air time?” Viola – another blog! Your heart is likely aflutter as you wonder what on earth I’ve come up with to post this time.
After rummaging through the topics bouncing around in my head, I figure it’s time for another Social Media blog. I’ve been tasked with defining the ROI for our social media strategy. Sounds easy, right? You’d be surprised.
Sure, our social media work is well planned out. Our team includes one full time ninja and a few other utility players that span other departments. Our strategy includes all kinds of tactics which we use to let the world (or our corner of it) know about speaking engagements, conferences, new product releases, updated product releases, changes to our website and portal, maintenance windows, outages, etc. (I’d get into more specifics about the tactics, but they are so classified that even I don’t know many of them).
So with something so defined and so well thought out, it must be really simple to see if we are #Winning, right? Well not really. Just the other day at the IDC Directions 2011 in Boston @erintraudt, used a great quote from Einstein to explain exactly how difficult it can be to quantify your results: “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” Every good marketing boss would love to be able to say, “We tweet this, we Facebook that, and we get this and that out of it every time,” but as you know, it just doesn’t work that way.
I will say that after listening to the panels and hearing how the big companies are attacking social media, I think we are years ahead of them in the game. The big ideas they are coming up with are things we tried two years ago, and we already know the pros and cons of those approaches.
I might not be able to hand you a spreadsheet with exactly how many sales and a given social campaign will have on our brand, but we’re starting to use a lot of pretty cool tools (some from our customers) to start figuring it all out. Maybe the ninja should be put on the case too.
What do you use to measure social media impact of your campaigns? Do you have a product or service we can check out?
What I can tell you is this: Our first concerted twitter campaign went much better than expected, and while I’m not at liberty to share many details, we think reaching a lot of relevant people who engaged with our content is a distinct measure of success. Even better: We paid less than $2.00 to do so!
I’ll take those kinds of results any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
-Skinman
