There are two ways to measure social media ROI: (1) direct profit that results when people act on an offer you publicize on a social channel (a promo code, a coupon, or the like); and (2) the contribution to profit and value that results from people engaging on social channels to chat, research, converse, and generally form a positive impression that inclines them to buy, recommend, follow, and stay loyal and satisfied.
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We help clients focus on that second, far more lucrative metric, also known as Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV. Ever heard of that? It’s a measure of the profit you can expect to generate from a customer as long as they remain a customer. It includes initial sales, renewals, upgrades, referrals, and other sometimes non-monetary indicators of buyer satisfaction.
How do you measure contribution to CLV? The slide deck linked here offers a glimpse into some of our client work that answers the question. If focuses less on the technology that underpins the effort, although we do provide a resource list, but more on the types of things you can measure and the ways you can capture the upstream inputs to do that measurement so you can determine what works and pivot to do more of that. We hope you find it helpful.
How do you measure social media ROI? Love to hear your stories. Comment below, or really open up the chat by sharing on your favorite social channel!
Recent seasonal business and commerce reports announce that the smartphone-toting Connected Customer, known affectionately as “Generation C”, now outnumbers the in-person buyer – and not just in retail stores. Generation C has higher expectations elsewhere, too; they expect their relationship with your business to evolve beyond a series of first dates – – a long-held expectation in the B2B space.
What’s your challenge?
To our delight, some industries are transforming to get in front of the trend (think: media, music, entertainment, phones), partly to compete but also to survive against disruptors, born in the digital age, who find new ways to free up inventory (Uber, AirBnB, Netflix, Spotify, Khan Academy). Meanwhile, many long-established industries risk extinction or deep disruption (encyclopedias, libraries, record stores, taxis, newspapers, education).
Turn your Digital Channel up to 11 (a free playboook)
Nobody said transforming your business to serve the Connected Customer would be easy. Indeed, it is often underestimated and under-resourced. Analyst reports repeatedly cite CXOs admitting that their modernization and transformation projects are failing to deliver expected ROI, with some projects even failing outright. But if you wish to survive, transforming to take advantage of speeds and feeds is essential.
Our clients, by contrast, almost uniformly report success in making the digital transformation, often with results that vastly exceed their expectations. What do they have in common? They consider the interconnected influences, impacts and perspectives I have outlined in this free e-book, whose insights are gleaned from dozens of client projects over the past 10+years.
Getting Started
If your future vision for your business involves the competitive advantages of empowered people, deeper insights, greater customer loyalty, and improved efficiency, that transformation is indeed possible. It just requires careful planning. Having that transformation initiative fail is not an option in the eyes of your Connected Customer. The hardest part, getting started, involves assessing your people, process and technology challenges in light of the opportunity.
I hope you find this e-book useful in planning a successful transformation. As always, I welcome your comments and questions.
In a recent visit with a class of college seniors, I was asked rather pointedly: are there any jobs in Social Media? Pondering this question, I had to answer it from two perspectives: the marketing agency, and the business organization.
First, the Agency Perspective
This is the far easier perspective. There are indeed roles that focus largely on social media. Marketing Agency clients who are either resource-strained or lack native expertise often outsource some aspects of social media communications to agencies whose mastery of branding, marketing communications, audience analytics, CRM, user experience design and social listening across various social channels and technical platforms can help the client achieve their audience goals.
Now, the Corporate Perspective
This one is by far more nuanced, but the answer is still a qualified yes. While there may not be corporate social media “jobs” per se, social media can help you perform just about any role better – whether or not your role is marketing intern. Consider the following aspects of work life and the importance of social media savvy for each aspect – no matter what profession or set of duties you are considering.
The Producer’s Role (your “product”)
Just about every job requires you to produce a measurable output. That could be a product, a result, a process step, a calculation, a recommendation, a report, etc. As a producer, you need to master certain skills such as content development to effectively communicate your process and results. It is useful to develop a “voice” within your team, company, and industry. Having an authentic, trusted, competent voice builds support for your ideas and for communicating results.
Social media channels can help you build and amplify your voice when you publish your ideas. A blog, wiki or website, a SlideShare-hosted PowerPoint presentation, a .pdf, or perhaps even a short video illustrating your message – all are useful avenues for publishing your (non-proprietary) works. Learning how to produce your content, including compelling visuals, is a good start. Knowing how to tag your content so it is searchable and visible online is now a baseline skill. Having grown up online, dear graduate, you probably know the importance of tagging and you consider it a natural part of projecting your content and your voice.
The Analyst’s Role (your “antenna”)
Often your job requires you to analyze information, interpret it in light of your organization’s needs and priorities, and present your interpretation in a way that is sensitive to your audience’s culture and your impact on their behavior. Learning to monitor social media channels within your industry, profession and business community can help you develop your “antenna” – a sensitivity to audience needs, requirements and trends – that can then help you better communicate your analyses and interpretations, raise awareness, enlist support, stimulate action and lead change.
Time spent on social media channels can also help you make sense of information, intelligently filter it, separate signal from noise and draw better-informed conclusions about the relative value of other voices and sources you encounter online.
The Designer’s Role (your “voice”)
Designers need to balance multiple roles, such as upward accountability for results as well as lateral, cross-organizational collaboration. Use of social media technologies helps you perform these functions better. Even simple schedule, project, chat, survey and other collaboration tools help you improve the quality and timeliness of your contribution to results. Enterprise software tools may often include intra-organizational social features, such as chat and wiki.
Crowdsourcing your ideas invites a broad array of new ideas and inputs, and helps validate a concrete course of action. Since it is widely accepted that at any given point in time the smartest people on any subject probably do not work with you or for you, consider crowdsourcing! Invite others’ input, learn to mediate and moderate among various idea directions, and you can achieve far better results, and possibly even avoid costly mistakes.
The Dispatcher’s Role (your “audience”)
Sending information is a standard function in most jobs. Social media tools give you practice at building an audience, understanding communications and cultural dynamics, and packaging your communications in ways that build a receptive audience clarify understanding.
The Leader’s Role (your “compass”)
The effective leader shepherds activity toward productive outcomes. Building omni-directional communication skills within channels, and cultivating a multi-channel audience, helps the organization leader communicate more effectively, support collaboration and achieve communication goals.
Over to You
So, dear Graduate, think not just about a social media job; think about how social media helps you do just about any job better. Can you think of a way it has worked, or could work, for you? What tools are you finding effective? I deliberately didn’t name many here. Love to hear your comments!
In 2012 I co-developed and produced the North by North Shore (#NXNS) digital media event series, and proved a few content marketing concepts along the way. Starting from zero in April, the program attracted a capacity, on-target audience in June – just 90 days – and attained an over 90% program satisfaction index, based on survey responses. We repeated the event in September, with a few audience driven improvements, and again achieved that result. Another success indicator: two-thirds of all event attendees paid less than full price to attend, driven by an assortment of social promotional programs that let each attendee run their own “friends and family” plan. Anyone who says you can’t prove the ROI of social media…well, have them call.
How did I target various micro-audiences to get these results? We could talk about the usual suspects like speakers, topics and location, but, speaking more broadly, I attribute the success of NXNS to the use of Choice Architecture and a Value Exchange framework in guiding program and content development. Now with two successful events in tow, we continue to engage our audiences to tune the program further to better address their challenges and learning needs:
SBO – small business owner
PRO – career professional, practitioner, specialist or solo-preneur
MSO – marketing services organization or consulting firm
CXO – senior executive
Understanding Motivation
We Content Marketers talk a lot about the buyer’s decision journey, the buyer persona, landing page optimization, and the like. All of this seems to assume we are adept at understanding motivation and that we use this knowledge when we develop content. Frankly, considering the repeated high demand for relevant content, I thought it would be nice just to ask the question: how good are you at building motivation into content? Often a simple “buy” button just doesn’t cut it. We’ve all felt a bit pushed at times by out-of-synch content. Here’s how to fix it.
The Value Exchange Continuum
The Value Exchange Continuum
I created this graphic to help decide what type of voice to use to appeal to different target audiences. Executives, for example, act, think and decide differently than other audiences. If you’ve developed a buyer persona or two to help you think about the frame of reference your micro-audiences are using when they encounter your content, then you are probably somewhat familiar with these concepts.
Keeping it Real
It’s helpful from time to time to ask: What do you want? What do you seek? What does any of us want out of life? If you think those questions are unnecessarily broad or existential, consider this: Neuromarketing experts suggest that up to 90% of decisions are made unconsciously, guided by our value frameworks.
This is a job for the Choice Architect, the User Experience (UX) practitioner. These are great people to have on your team when you are designing a website, a sign, an event, a white paper, a presentation, or just about any type of audience-focused content.
Next up (You In?)
If you like the NXNS concept and want to participate, by all means use the handy links at the NXNS site to get started as a speaker, sponsor, media partner, attendee or content contributor. Let me know some specific event or other opportunity you might have in mind. And if you are interested in Sustainability topics, consider attending the Sustainable Network Summit, another new event series I am co-producing.
Your Take
Do you have a content development framework that guides your content creation? Do you have an experienced Editor on your team who is tasked with hewing to a particular point of view or tone of voice that personifies your brand? Love to hear your stories. If you’d like to have this case study presented to your audience, contact us.
Forget B2B. Forget B2C. Embrace E2E: Everyone to Everyone. Business and consumers alike are voting with their wallets and making mobile, tablet and personal 2-in-1 devices the “first screen” – relegating laptops, desktop PCs and wall-mounted flat screen TVs to “second screen” status. They are messaging one another. And they are talking about you. Are you listening? Hello?
A few organizations have adopted the playbook to address this shift. It seems, however, that most are not even thinking about the user-centric, user-generated, user-driven, mobile-first, E2E experience. That makes it a huge opportunity, if you set your mind to it.
Aaron Shapiro, blogging for the Harvard Business Review, cited the “Software Layer” as an area of focus for optimizing this E2E User experience, no matter what business you are in. I have incorporated some of his thoughts into the following 20-page storybook. It’s a quick read (lots of pictures), and it outlines a framework for how Users interact with your Business through a Software Layer. Enjoy!
Enjoy the brief SlideShare preso
I hope you find it useful in framing your thoughts on how to compete and excel.
Suffice to say, the race is on, and competing is not optional.
Make this the year you embrace the Software Layer of your business to drive User engagement, new opportunity, and new levels of success.
How is your organization adapting to the “Everyone to Everyone” world? Love to hear your stories.
