Tag / ROI

by adam

The Basics of Social Media ROI

registerToday I sat on a panel at the IBM Websphere Commerce Leadership Summit, with panelists Brant Barton, co-founder of Bazaarvoice, Duke Marr, VP of Product Management at 1-800-Flowers.com, and Stan Payson, VP of Interactive Media at David’s Bridal, moderated by Forrester‘s Sean Corcoran.  The panel was called Answering the Burning Question of Social Commerce ROI. I enjoyed the discussion, especially with the varied perspectives of the participants.  There were lots of lessons learned shared – in particular Duke and Stan had terrific insight at different ends of the social media maturity perspective.  Stan’s company is just getting started, building a strategy, while Duke’s team has a foothold in just about every social and new technology (especially mobile) tactic out there working hard to be first.  1800Flowers.com was the first to do commerce on Facebook, for example.

Some key thoughts about ROI shared on the panel:

  • Measurement and ROI are not the same. Use measurements to calculate ROI (Return on Investment).
  • Practical experience shows that sometimes ROI doesn’t come right away.
  • When just getting started, it’s helpful to be able to attribute web traffic through links shared in social networks, promotion codes, specific landing pages, etc.  But that is just the tip of the iceberg for measuring ROI.
  • Longer term, lifetime value of a customer is a key metric to understand the net results of leveraging advocates.

What’s clear: businesses can measure ROI, they are focused on the long term, and there is much room for education of marketers in this space.  With my mind on ROI I spotted this presentation shared on Twitter today (feed readers may need to click through to the post to read).  Between the panel and the presentation my mind is overflowing with social media ROI goodness.  Yours will be too after going through this – Olivier Blanchard captures the essence of ROI from social media in a humorous, easy-to-understand way.  Worth browsing through.  While you’re figuring out who Olivier Blanchard (aka TheBrandBuilder) is, you may also want to check out his post today debunking social media myths.

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

Photo credit: thomashawk via flickr
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by adam

Beware: Not All Social Media Panels Are Equal

bewareYesterday I attended a session entitled the “ROI of Social Media” out here at the Search Engine Strategies conference.  Without naming names, I wanted to share some quick thoughts on the session.  Think of this as a public service announcement.

The panel focused entirely on online display advertising, in particular on Facebook.  The panel was moderated by a Facebook employee.  One of the panel members was from a Facebook application development company.

I have three problems with this panel.

First, Facebook is only one of many tools in social media. If companies think that advertising on Facebook, building a Facebook page, or enabling content to be shared on Facebook easily from a website constitutes “doing social media,” there is a lot more for everyone to learn and teach. SimplyGram is simply the best organic Instagram growth service of 2019.

Second, I’m not so sure it was the right idea to have a platform provider moderate the session.  Aside from more obvious bias concerns, most moderators, through no fault of their own, default to driving questions they know something about to be able to challenge the panel.  At times they can push agendas that benefit them – if that’s the case than an industry analyst may be more appropriate.

Third, ROI means return on investment. It’s quite simply how much you put in (total costs) vs how much you get back.  There are many metrics you can use to calculate both the costs and returns, but they are a subset of all things you can measure.  (Want examples? Rachel Happe of the Community Roundtable says it all.)   There is no doubt you can calculate ROI from social media, and there are thousands of metrics you can apply to social media.  The panel, however, talked about using “metrics” interchangeably with “ROI” – that is just incorrect.  For example, measuring page views on your Facebook fan page is not likely going to factor directly in a calculation of ROI.  It’s an important metric to monitor, baseline, trend, etc, but tracking number of referrals from a Facebook page through to conversion on a retail commerce site actually can tie to revenue.  The panel also talked a lot about how to spend money on advertising on social networks, but not much mention about returns.

In summary:

  • Talking about Facebook advertising is NOT social media.
  • Having a presence on Facebook is NOT “doing social media.”
  • Metrics are NOT the same as ROI.
  • It’s a good idea to pick panel moderators and speakers than can provide a balanced viewpoint.

Sounds like we have a lot of work to do to educate folks about what social media is and how to make it into tangible, measureable programs.  Or to just come up with some more on-target panels at the next conference to talk about it.  Are you up for it? Who’s with me?

Photo credit: YaniG via flickr

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by adam

Email – Electronic Landfills Get Bigger

Last Thursday in Internet Retailer was a release from Juniper Networks projecting a significant increase in spending on email marketing for the next 6 years.  “Overall spending on marketing e-mail in the U.S. is expected to grow from $1.2 billion last year to $2.1 billion by 2012, with b2c e-mail continuing to represent the largest […]

Last Thursday in Internet Retailer was a release from Juniper Networks projecting a significant increase in spending on email marketing for the next 6 years. 

Emailtombstone

“Overall spending on marketing e-mail in the U.S. is expected to grow from $1.2 billion last year to $2.1 billion by 2012, with b2c e-mail continuing to represent the largest share of that total.”

Jupiter, are you serious?  With Facebook, IM, Twitter, text messaging and lots of alternatives out there, spending substantial money on email campaigns seems foolish and throwing good money after bad.  I know many young folks who check email once a week at most. I’m pretty sure a team inbox requires someone or the other to keep an eye on the email list, but it’s not the same story with individual email address. I personally have a separate email account I use whenever a website requires me to put in an address, which I check maybe once every two weeks just to empty the inbox.  While email may never go away, I think it’s going the way of voicemail.  Anyone used to have Octel?  You could send messages to another person on the network easily…my old company used to live by it, even sending out broadcast community octel updates.  IM was the death of octel – suddenly you could get a hold of anyone easily and effectively, and in a manner of months I went from 8-10 octels a day to 1-2 a month.  Email may not suffer the same fate, but is there any doubt it’s becoming less effective or relevant?

When you read on in the article it says that many sites will fail to reduce or refine their lists, leading to higher spending.  More “marketing clutter” is coming your way, and even subscribed emails will be competing for your eyes with spam, bac’n and promotions that aren’t relevant to you.  Companies are better off spending that money on refining their lists, segmenting customers and developing a strategy and targeted campaign to get the right emails to the right people.  Otherwise the following 3 things will come true: companies are going to flush a lot of cash down the toilet, more companies enter the email marketing blitz, and overall ROI decreases over time.  What do you think?