One of the best things about social media is that you don’t need to “make it up” yourself. Yes, that’s right. There are thousands of very smart people sharing their ideas, expertise and knowledge – for free (just click on any of the links in my blogroll and you will be taken to the blog of someone whose ideas and abilities I respect). Your challenge is to take this vast amount of knowledge and contextualise it.
Olivier Blanchard has put together an excellent presentation on the ROI of social media. In fact, he has an outstanding series on the subject, but this presentation nails it down to a bunch of easily digestible slides. He explains exactly what ROI is (return as in $$) and what it is not (intangibles). He talks baselines and measurements. And importantly, Olivier shows exactly how you can measure the intangibles that come with social media to show how they are impacting the growth in your revenues or reductions in your costs.
So, if you are starting to get social with your marketing, take a flick through these slides so that when you are ready to talk with the bossman, you have the answers you will need. Because even if those questions aren’t being asked now, they will be in the future.
Gavin, I found that really entertaining, I watch a video from him recently that covered the same content but this was much better.
What’s driving me nuts is what movie those images are from, I am sure I loved it when I was a kid. Can anyone help me out with a title?
Nice 🙂 Thanks for posting Gavin
You know, I can’t actually place it. I might just have to ask Olivier.
I love Oliver’s presentation because it gets the right message across in a really funny way. Putting ROI measures in place is a long term process, particularly if there are long lead times an offline sales channels. The big take away is that you need to start working towards an ROI measure from the get go.
I think that a huge potential business benefit from embracing social media is that it brings your employees much closer to customers and into the mindset of “how can we help our customers today?”. Imagine the impact of that cultural shift within an organisation.
There’s some more on this concept here: http://contactcenterintelligence.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/service-logic-and-the-implications-for-a-new-social-customer-relationships-marketing-logic/