Last night I gave a presentation at an AMA Toronto chapter event at the Spoke. The focus of the evening was how to calculate the ROI of social media .
All in all, it was a fantastic event. We were expecting about 50 people, but almost double that turned out to hear me, Bryan Segal from Comscore and Steve Irvine from 80/20 solutions present.
Based on the turnout, there’s no question that the issue of social media roi is something that every marketer is struggling with. And while figuring out ROI is not the mainstay of Social Currency’s business, I elected to take the subject head on.
I said in my talk that social media is not the first medium to be challenged in this way – and while few mediums have ever been able to adequately address the ROI issue, social media must still try in order to earn its place at the table alongside more traditional channels. Bosses and clients will need to understand how social media contributes to metrics that matter, like sales and profit. For budget holders right now, money talks but talk is cheap. So there probably needs to be a lot of social media talk in order to add up to anything of value!
Sometimes I think brands are too narrowly focused on social media and need to think of it in a more holistic manner. Brands need to focus on ways to contribute value – give people something to talk about – it doesn’t need to start with social media itself. If getting consumers talking about your brand is the goal, then you must first give them something worthy of conversation. Social media metrics is then just one KPI to look to when evaluating success.
A shout out for my presentation must go to industry thought leaders John Lovett and Dr. Paul Marsden who’ve made tremendous contributions to the thinking in this area, which I shamelessly drew upon.
