Social Marketing Conversations

The behaviors in social media are broad, but not so broad they cannot be identified.  When you visit a blog, you can only do so many things –

These options assume a text blog, but even if it is a video blog or any other type of social platform, we agree that the actions that might be taken are not infinite. 

Is One Action More Valuable Than Another? I think so.  Subscribing to a blog, or opting-in to receive more content from the same author or source, is a much higher value action than just dropping in to consume a single article.  Thinking enough of the content or the author to share with others in your network begins to establish you as an advocate of the content, not just a visitor that consumes the content – this is a holy grail of online marketing, to have advocates for your brand, not just consumers of your content.

The process that takes a content consumer from one level to another is worthy of evaluation by the marketing community and as the content consumer moves along the continuum, ranking the value of one activity over another becomes meaningful.

Why Try to Establish The Value of an Activity or Mention? By assigning a value to the activity, you can develop a more easily conveyed ‘score’ that allows you to determine in non-financial terms, how well you are doing in the effort to leverage social media as a marketing tactic.  The score needs to be couched with other data I imagine, such as number of posts contained in the score and some factor that recognizes the age of the post, but if we are intent on establishing an ROI at some point of the effort, this kind of key indicator data serves a meaningful purpose.

Meet the Social Interaction Scoring Table.  My associate, Guy Powell and I have been discussing and working on the ROI of Social Media and during the conversation this notion came to me.  From that point I developed this table as an example of the scoring that might apply to not just a blog post, but a wide variety of social media platforms.

I share it here for your comment and to open a community dialog on the concept of being able to score the Social Interaction and how it begins to support the process of measuring mentions.

I got involved in social media because I am a pretty social guy, involved in many different groups off line and always looking for those that best match my personal interests and desires.  Social media is great for my outgoing personality type.

I started my blog sometime ago looking to explore the real ROI of social media and at the 2007 Podcamp AZ I even gave a presentation on the ROI of social media.  My message during that presentation was that the ROI metrics were in flux and that we had not yet come up with readily assessable ROI metrics, but that metrics are available for the social media effort.  Just not tied to an ROI model yet.

I just went looking for data to backup a statement that there were many areas of the business affected by social media, but what I found is that there is still a debate about ROI going on.  Ray Schiel’s Blog cites lots of social media implementations from lots of companies, but I found it by looking at Peter Kim’s post titled ‘Slicing and Dicing A List of Social Media Marketing Examples‘ where Peter suggests in his very next post ‘Social Media Marketing’s New Clothes’ that like any other business investment, there is really only one way to calculate an ROI – that is with a financial ratio that has been out there for quite some time.

I have to agree with peter and at the same time suggest that the work Jeremiah Owyang is doing is right in line with his ongoing work providing a solid social media ROI model.  But even Jeremiah states in his blog in an article titled “The Many Challenges of the Social Media Industry” that “Despite many attempts to measure “engagement” or “ROI” there still is no industry standard to measure the efforts of social media at the personal –and corporate level. While many have developed their own ability to measure on a one-off way, there’s no industry way to quickly –and easily agree pan-industry.”

With all these great minds working on the problem, does that mean that an ROI does not exist?  Well, not yet… not in a simple financial ratio that can equate social participation with a dollar of revenue.  The practice of social media is in my mind something more of an art than a science.  The variables include talent, tenacity, sensitivity to the communities you participate in and interestingly in the sincerity you can project in those engagements.

The online community is both fickle and forgiving; fickle if you think you can some how ‘fool’ them into using your product or service and forgiving if you happen to stumble in a genuine effort to participate in the community and fail, but then get up, brush yourself off and try again.  The lesson you need to learn for success in social media however is transparency.  Whether you project it or not, the audience will see it – they’re sharp and more info about you, your company and your real intentions are no more than a search bar / mouse click away.

I do not think a direct ROI model can be created as a standard / direct ROI right now – we’re still too early in the adoption of the technology to make that kind of assessment, but I do think we can make other assessments that are meaningful.  My next post will explore the areas of the business that social media impacts.