The image shimmers out of focus and disappears – an image of your accountant materializes and tells you that you’re a business burning through a million a month and when you get visitor to your site, there is nothing more than a form to fill-out for a call back.  The phone number on the ‘Contact Us’ page leads to a ‘Dell Hell’ kind of experience and no human being can be reached from outside.   Zombies?  Yeah – they get through, but only because they’re brain-eating, persistent monsters randomly pushing buttons on their Zombie-phones.

The final chapter in this scary tale is that you have no idea whether that $1.12 pay per click campaign has driven ANY traffic to cover your costs or whether the visitor has even been to your site before.  Scary huh?

It’s a horror story being repeated a million times in a million companies all around the world.  In spite of all the automated counters, data collectors and postings in the social web, businesses leap to use the technology that has been promised to get hundreds of customers to walk through your door.   Most businesses have no idea how or if the investments in marketing you’re made are panning out.

The hero in this horror story is that it’s not an unsolvable equation and making better decisions about where and when to invest is possible – more so than has ever been possible.

How to Escape the Nightmare

Start with the small things – listen first… listen like the mummy is somewhere around you – quietly and intently.  Find out where your customers are congregating like a crowd of brain-eating zombies.

Next, understand what your audience is saying and what they’re talking about.  Knowing that Dr. Jeckle is also Mr. Hyde will help you craft and time the message so that Mr. Hyde is prompted to connect with your Facebook page, leaving Dr. Jeckle out of the community of followers and friends.

Now reach out to connect. The tentacles of human-hunting aliens should have nothing on you.  Once you know what’s being said , who is saying it and to whom they are saying it means that you can regularly and easily participate in the discussions going on and not been seen or treated as the Monster from the Black Lagoon.

Now take a step back every time you post new content and see if you’ve put out what speaks meaningfully to your audience.  Include a call to action, a link and most of all, make sure you’re participation is relevant to the audience.  For the hard cost that goes into an installation of Google Analytics, you can see the correlation between postings and visits.  If you have a product that can be purchased online, even by using a Gift card or eGift card, you can then start tracking how visitors arrived at you site, where they came from and what they did after they left your site.

Is this all you need to do? Maybe… but I’d bet that this implementation would only be the start of the journey to improving the payoff of your online and social marketing investment.

Beginning with these steps will help keep you off the Elm Street of marketing when Freddy is prowling for a new victim.  As you participate in the discussions and communities relevant to you your product and company you’ll uncover what content drives participation and engagement – the first step in stopping what doesn’t work and what does.  Following these simple steps will keep next year’s Halloween Haunters away from the doorstep, out of the cellar and vanquished from the creaky attic.

Related posts:

• Payola in the Blog-sphere – ReadWriteWeb’s Proclamation
• Twitter’s Social Capital is Unlimited – Joe Jaffe is wrong…
• The Trinity of Social Media Explored Further – Microblogging

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.

Related posts:

• Coffee Shop Social Media Case Study – How to Give Away A Product and Get Results
• The ROI of Social Media Series – Mike Talbot and Aaron Newman / Alterian SM2 – Episode 3
• Twitter’s Social Capital is Unlimited – Joe Jaffe is wrong…

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.

Related posts:

• Social Media Here, Social Media there, Social Media Everywhere!
• Logo icon for the ROI of Social Media
• The Death of Social Media – Long Live Media That is Social!