Social Media ROI is dead because Social Media ROI is an absolute failure for marketing executives to measure in perfect financial terms. If I’m wrong, then you are welcome to use the comments section below to tell me your complete and verifiable, Social Media, financial impact on your business operations. I will mail a free Terametric hat to anyone who can show me that they deliver testable and repeatable Social Media ROI, every day, to their CMO or CFO.

Why is it dead?
Social media impacts more than just the social media channels in which we have outbound communications and inbound customer call-to-action. Its scope touches all channels of customer engagement, both inbound and outbound. Social media gets customers into your stores to chat with your frontline employees. It gets customers to download your eBook for a free trial. It terrifies your competitors into trying to imitate instead of innovate. It allows your sales executive to be an industry thought leader via Twitter or his company blog where customers can engage in a conversation. Thus, social media impacts several aspects of business operations, most likely, leading to severely underestimated ROI estimates.

3 ways you can lift your Social Media ROI and marketing impact
Social media forces us to engage our marketing mix forecast and execution as an integrated marketing effort. If you’re busy trying to prove Social media ROI, forget it. Here are 3 ways you should maximize your Social media ROI and impact on your business without the struggle to justify an exact financial measure.

1. Make sure you are maximizing the return on your marketing efforts in the social media channels that you have the biggest need. What are the most critical outbound channels on which your customer are responding? What are the inbound factors that you can monitor for social media impact?

2.Monitor your top 5 competitors to understand which social media channels deliver to them the highest marketing impact. If they’re getting multiple retweets from their customer service Twitter accounts, then where and how are you investing your customer Twitter engagements?

3.Look for testable correlations between your outbound efforts and the inbound impacts. Yes! You can test correlation daily, weekly, monthly! Deliver greater effort to the correlations that you can test over a sustained period, no less than 2 weeks. Positive correlations will make it easy to identify the causes while competing effectively to lift Social media impact on your marketing mix.

Just because we can’t yet perfectly measure Social media ROI doesn’t mean we can’t measure Social media impact and the resulting return on the rest of our marketing and selling activities. Long live Social Media ROI as our focus on measuring the value of this new medium will give marketers better insight into where they should invest precious marketing and sales resources.

Tags: marketing channel, marketing investment, Social Media Measurement, Social Media ROI, Social Media Strategy

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 7th, 2010 at 6:34 PM by Taariq Lewis and is filed under Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.