You can only go on for so long with a social communications program in a business before you absolutely need to quantify the results of your actions.
If not because your CEO or CFO is demanding it, then at least to prove to yourself that what you’re doing is actually accomplishing something. And by ‘something’, I don’t mean ‘making you feel good’. I mean some kind of tangible benefit that you wouldn’t otherwise have.
This topic is a divisive one in the world of social media. There are many who say that trying to calculate ROI of social activities is like trying to calculate the ROI of your best friend, or your mother. Others still cling to the classic ROI calculations of traditional media: impressions, clicks, views, etc. Neither of these approaches is going to get you very far in social media. The first approach simply ignores the fundamentals of being in business at all, and the second gives you a mountain of raw data with absolutely no context.
Say hello to Olivier Blanchard. AKA: @thebrandbuilder
He’s authored an unrelenting book that will not let you get away without realizing that the measures of Social Media go far beyond ‘Likes’ and ‘Follows’, and that YES, IT DOES have a measurable impact on the bottom line of a business. In this book, Blanchard leaves no area of social communications ROI untouched, and beautifully illustrates how every business function can benefit from these new channels, not just Marketing.
By taking a ‘company-wide’ approach instead of walling it up inside one particular business function, Blanchard shows how the returns a business can achieve as a result of social communications grow exponentially as it becomes more ingrained in to the entirety of the organization.
Social Media ROI isn’t a ‘preachy’ book. It’s overflowing with usable examples and gets right to the ‘meat’ of how to look at the effects of your actions. By the end of it, you will easily be able to say ‘By doing THIS, we hope to achieve THAT, and will measure it by looking at what happens to X, Y and Z’. The approaches outlined in this book will allow you to pull the data you need to show anyone in an organization how they can or have benefited from certain social media activities, whether it be your marketing intern or your CEO.
I’d highly recommend anyone involved in social communications to give this book a read. It will allow you to formulate cohesive approaches to measuring the effects of your actions, analyze the data you obtain, and present it in context to those people which it matters most. A great book!
NOTE: My copy of Social Media ROI was purchased, and this review was not solicited in any way.
This article originally written for http://crowdshifter.com