Social media success doesn’t start with ROI

I came across this blog post through my Social Media stream on Twitter (@PaulDJohnston) and was intrigued.

Social Media and ROI – Not Again!

This has been a raging argument for a while now within Social Media circles about how everyone seems to want to know the ROI (if you’re not sure what ROI means, I’m talking about “Return On Investment”) before they get started.

Clients apparently want people to come to them and say “for this much money, you will get this return” and so often, it’s really hard to do that. The post above points out that ROI is not always how you measure something like painting a wall or a secretary. Sometimes, you just need to do them.

However, now that clients want to know about “ROI”, companies like ourselves providing this information need to give it to them. Or do they? Is this just the fact that most companies trying to get involved with Social Media are marketing agencies or web techies? Why is this a problem?

Measurement of “Success” is not the same as ROI

Social Media can be “campaign” based, such as a Direct Marketing or an Email Marketing campaign, but the success is never about a bump in numbers or the number of engagements over time.

Social Media is much more about a holistic approach to the people in the organisation. It is teaching them to be engaging and engagable (if that is indeed a real word).  Getting people to have conversations and share interesting information and content.  Social is about conversation and without content and at least 2 parties, there is no conversation.

Measurement of success will be in much more intangible metrics, such as “are more people talking about our product positively” or “are calls to customer services reducing because our community are sharing how to do stuff with each other?”, or even “are we more aware of what the real issues are with our clients?”.

What you share with people will have an effect, but providing a measurement of awareness or positivity is very difficult. Measuring call volume is easier and very basic, but measuring it in relation to social media is definitely not so easy.

ROI is not the key to Success

Of course a Social Media campaign must have a way of measuring success, but the metrics are much harder to manage and engage with than with Direct Marketing and Email Marketing.

Maybe, just maybe, Social Media should be seen as a harder task than these well understood and measurable campaign-based tools like Email Marketing and Direct Marketing. Maybe, just maybe, Social Media should command a much bigger budget than it currently appears to.