Social media and the bottom line: Are “impressions” and followers good enough?

By Sally Saville Hodge

“I love social media. I think it has great potential. But I can’t figure out how we can make money off it.”

With those words our client gave voice to the $64,000 question that gets debated with increasing frequency in communications circles. How do you measure social media ROI? It ranks right up there with PR (did someone mention “ad value equivalency”?) as an issue that has no truly satisfactory solutions.

Many clients, including some of ours, want to see a direct correlation between social media initiatives and cash registers ringing (or the equivalent thereof). The reality, of course, is that marketing or PR, whoever owns social media in your organization, typically doesn’t have control over many of the factors that will close the sale.

In other words, we can heighten awareness through social media strategies. We can get you friends and followers by designing engaging initiatives. We can drive traffic to your site through smartly conceived e-newletters and e-marketing initiatives or press releases distributed over wire or well-placed articles in the traditional or digital media.

But we can’t close the sale, and if you’re not able to deliver operationally, then it’s all for naught.

Blogger Steve Goldner made these points in a post last year, and like others opining on the topic of social media ROI, has suggested some parameters to help you weigh whether your efforts are paying off. Among them: number of friends and followers, the amount of discussions being generated (including written, video and photo comments), number of retweets and number of downloads.

All are well and good, but I suspect such measures are likely to leave the financial guys less than impressed.

The reality is that setting up a systematic process to get at ROI – whether it’s for social media, PR or marketing – is hard work. Take a look at this great slideshow that lays out, in a very amusing way, what it takes to get at meaningful measures that tell you over time just how successful your social media initiatives are.

Bigger businesses may be willing, and they have the wherewithal, to make that kind of investment. Smaller businesses, however, don’t typically have the internal resources to do it themselves. And they’d rather pay us to develop the ideas and help execute. Not to measure.

It’s a conundrum, all right. The solution may lie in a combination of efforts, particularly among smaller businesses: Demonstrating growth in awareness (e.g. increased friends/followers, etc.) and using website analytics to track growth in visitors, downloads and other key measures.

It may not directly address the “show me the money” question, but is more substantive than the “you’ll know success when you see it” gauge that we’ve seen too many businesses settle for.

Twitterature: A new twist on creative writing

By Sally Saville Hodge

I wish I had a nickel for every eye-roll I’ve encountered when mentioning Twitter as a social media channel.

I wish I had a dime for every person who’s ever told me they thought Twitter was stupid, without trying it first to get the context.

I wish I had a quarter for everyone who’s ever asked me what they’d Tweet about anyway, and how can anyone possibly write about anything meaningfully in 140 characters or less.

Well, no one’s getting rich off Twitter yet – least of all me. Even though an increasing number of businesses are apparently using it as a tool to build their images and contribute over the long haul to their revenue streams. Think Dell. Or Zappos. Or even small businesses without the big guys’ resources, like the coffeeshop CoffeeGroundz.

But one interesting way to look at Twitter goes beyond dollars and cents and considers its contribution to our culture as spawning a creative new literary form. Time magazine columnist James Poniewozik writes about it, and makes some relevant comparisons to how writers have, through the ages, “shaped their work to exploit technology.”

Now, there’s “Twitterature” that goes well beyond the Tweets and re-Tweets of celebrity doings, endless links to this or that article, and mindless meanderings about Average Joe or Jill’s day.

We have humor. Comedian Justin Halpern’s posts as @shitmydadsays have earned him such a following that it has led to a television show, to premier this fall. A recent sample: ”I don’t want your advice, you’re 27 fucking years old…Fine. I don’t want your advice, you’re 29 fucking years old.”

There’s satire. Consider @BPGlobalPR which has gained legions of followers since the disaster on the Gulf Coast. Its biting posts surely are giving BP’s real PR team fits. To wit: “Surprised ourselves by getting emotional on the coast today. Turns out the wind blew dispersant in our eyes.”

And satiric writing resources, even. Anyone who has ever referred to the venerable AP Stylebook for guidance will appreciate @FakeAPStylebook: “Spell it “ellipsis,” “ellipses,” “elipsis,” “ellipseseisis” – no one really knows or cares.”

I’m having trouble with the idea of a sitcom designed around a Twitter feed, no matter how good the posts. And for me, Twitterature will never replace the well-written book, newspaper or magazine or even blog article. But it does the job of providing entertainment in fast, bite-sized morsels. It’s pretty apropos for our lifestyles today.

Why some call it ‘the dark side’…

By Sally Saville Hodge

Plenty of bloggers are out there who have made it a specialty of outing really bad PR practices. Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of fodder to work with.

I’m not about to give Richard Laermer and Kevin Dugan at The Bad Pitch Blog a run for their money, but occasionally, Richard flags an instance of egregiously horrendous behavior that I have to share.

In posting about it on Facebook, he called it “funny.” (And not in a ha-ha way.) I couldn’t watch the clip without cringing and feeling truly embarrassed on this practitioner’s behalf…since clearly he was totally oblivious to the many ways he was crossing the boundaries of professional and just plain interpersonal behaviors.

Clients: Do not mistakenly believe this is the kind of aggressiveness you want in your PR person. It damages not only his brand, but yours.

There’s a reason many of my journalist friends talk about moving into PR as going to the dark side.