Apparently, this is how you calculate the ROI of social media. But let me expand further below the jump…
It was the moment people in the room had been waiting for. The presenter was at the start of his presentation into Social Media Effectiveness. The slide was a picture of a cup of tea. The accompanying summary “Trying to find the ROI for Social Media is like trying to find the ROI for a cup of tea”. Silence descends on the room. People leave. Social Media slowly dies.
If this is genuinely what we think about Social Media ROI, then the industry is in big trouble. I know there are exponents thinking differently about ROI, trying to approach it and create a smart way of looking at how Social Media contributes. We all talk about “effectiveness” but what we show is “affect”, not actually a ROI. How come we can’t get there any quicker?
When I first started in the industry, the year 2001, we were attaching margins to search keywords for clients like Expedia. It was simple. We knew the page people landed on and could assign a value to that page, then link back to the keyword. We can create goals in Google Analytics and link that back to unique URLs, so we should be able to link a video view to a visit to a sales page.
The problem is we focus on engagement. Engagement is simply the first stage in a consumer journey. Yes, we should be producing content that is engaging, but there are different types of engagement as highlighted below.
We need to start taking the lack of proven ROI seriously. Otherwise Social Media might just be left on the side as “something we tried”, I’m looking forward to the next IPA Social Media Effectiveness conference where we have genuine case studies about ROI, Effectiveness, and some award winning effectiveness campaigns.
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非谁莫属
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非谁莫属
