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.

Getting beneath the buzz of digital communications strategies

By Sally Saville Hodge

It’s kind of hard these days to escape how much digital communications have permeated our lives.

Newscasters happily chirp: “Follow us on Twitter!” With-it seniors talk about how they have “friended” their kids on Facebook just to know what they’re doing, while their kids talk about blocking them from all but the most mundane conversations. We go online to research our purchases and make the buy. We eagerly await Groupon’s deal of the day’s arrival in our inbox. Snail mail’s dead; long live e-mail!

As marketers, it’s our job to demonstrate how to make the most of the opportunities and challenges that lie within all these new channels. Our charge: Not just to build awareness but, importantly, to help them build their businesses.

It would seem, however, that we communicators are pretty much talking to ourselves with all our articles, blog posts, presentations, what have you. There’s a lot of noise in our circles. But apparently, it’s not getting out to the people who need to hear. At least, in the small businesses arena, that is.

Citibank recently released a survey of small business executives (100 or fewer employees) that underscores the need for us to broaden our audience. It showed:

• 81 percent hadn’t explored social media.
• 47 percent see no value to Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn for their businesses.
• Nearly 40 percent of their businesses have no website.
• 62 percent don’t utilize e-mail marketing to promote their business.
• 84 percent haven’t engaged in e-commerce.

How embarrassing is it to have been throwing a party that’s gone unattended by the most important guests?

The small business market is important to smaller agencies like mine. Those of us who believe that digital strategies can help our clients succeed need to do a better job of demonstrating why. Here’s how we should be thinking about this:

First, there are a lot of social media hacks out there. Businesses should be aware of the difference between professionals who truly understand the digital space and those who are really book (or article) smart. A campaign that is poorly designed is going to render lackluster results, and further delay broader adoption.

Second, just because you can set up a Facebook page, should you? We need to do better at understanding the total business and making a case for how digital strategies align with business goals and objectives and stand to move the organization forward on its growth path. Practical and relevant cases are important, as is an eye to more significant metrics than “impressions.”

Third, we need to be mindful of small business financial resources, and how that might fuel executives’ skepticism. This means we professionals would be better off starting small, measuring the results, and constantly fine-tuning to ensure the payoff’s there before venturing deeper into the waters.

Finally, I also believe that the flexibility to offer “value added” services is an important differentiator for smaller agencies, and one that gives us far more latitude with our clients to experiment. All within reason, of course. If we worry a bit less about the hours and more about solidifying relationships, we can set up a win/win situation in proving out the value of integrating digital and traditional strategies.

Technology advances have created exciting possibilities to connect more widely and deeply with various audiences. But the buzz is so loud that it may be distracting those who might benefit the most from the practical realities beneath it.

The press release revived

Sally Saville Hodge

I’ve long since lost track of the number of people who have come to me over the years saying, “We want public relations. Do you do press releases?”

PR is not, in fact, an acronym for Press Releases, a misconception fostered by many so-called PR professionals who apparently aren’t creative enough to find other tactics to add to their toolkits. It’s also often perpetuated by marketers who don’t know any better to challenge such thinking.

Well, of course, we do press releases. But for a long time, because of the kind of public relations we practice, we actually only did a handful a year. I found them so useless compared to other, more targeted and customized approaches to media relations that I wrote an article titled “The Press Release is Dead (Will Somebody Please Tell the Clients?).”

It appeared on MarketingProfs.com (Google my name and it’s still first up, four years later!) and generated numerous e-mails and blog posts, some friendly, some scathing. (And curiously enough, it also generated calls from prospective clients wanting to talk to us about, believe it or not, helping them do more and better press releases!)

PR folks sure do take their press releases seriously. And the debate over their value continues. Just last week, I linked through to End Game PR’s blog to read a post on “10 Dead or Dying PR Tactics.” Sure enough, the press release received honorable mention – with the author acknowledging its rebirth even though many experts put it in the doornail category.

I, however, am no longer of that opinion. It’s not because I now think it’s a particularly effective tool to reach reporters. It’s because of the changing nature of the media, and the 24/7 demand for content. It’s created much higher pickup rates by news sites for optimized releases that are driven out through wire distribution services. That, in turn, drives traffic to clients’ Web sites. Used in tandem with targeted and customized media outreach, it creates sustainable gains in visitors. (From there, of course, the trick is to get them to take some sort of action – but that’s a whole different post.)

Here’s how we have seen this play out for one client, an egg donor and surrogate recruitment agency. In late November, we distributed a news release via PR Newswire that was picked up by 123 news sites, and caused a 441 percent jump in traffic. A few days later, our direct pitching resulted in the story being picked up by a Chicago Tribune health reporter’s blog, which sustained the traffic gains. A few days after that, the Wall Street Journal carried a separate article quoting the client, which was in turn picked up by the Huffington Post and the “Quote of the Day” feature on Time magazine’s Web site. Traffic surged another 162 percent on top of the earlier gains.

It’s best if releases are accompanied by direct reporter outreach, but even without, they can create a healthy flow of traffic. For this same client, for example, we distributed two releases in February, without broader media coverage, and its site experienced a 138 percent increase in traffic.

It’s tricky given the nature of this client’s business to draw a correlation between increased traffic and increased business, since not everyone who might take action once they are on the Web site is qualified to be either an egg donor or a surrogate. But the client can see a correlating increase in calls and submission of online forms with the traffic surge – and so is happy with the results.

Press releases have experienced a happy recovery. They still have to be written well – and smart – and will never be the only tactic in a strategic communications toolkit. But it’s well worth talking to clients about rethinking how they’re used in a comprehensive program.