Social Media is not a Telephone or Pants

  By Tac Anderson | January 27, 2010 - 9:38 am |

You’ve all the heard the arguments about measuring social media:

How do you measure the ROI of your telephone?

Or my other favorite:

What’s the ROI of putting on your pants in the morning?

Seriously?

Man, this ain’t my social media, this is a cell phone. Duh!

The ROI of putting your pants on:

In all seriousness, having a phone at work and putting on your pants is a cost of business. At one time having phones at everyone’s desk was something that had to be justified. Now having a phone is a cost and managed accordingly. Do you really want social media to be managed by cost and not by return? Guess which gets more budgets?

BTW: Unless you work from home the ROI of putting on your pants should never have been a question.

The greater risk here is that the people who are resistance to measuring social media are well intentioned and for the most part “get” social media. While we’re sitting around debating the merits of measuring social media, marketers and advertisers are calculating the ROI of Facebook fans and followers.

Facebook Develops Conversion Tracking Tool: What’s A Fan Worth?

Boland also served up advice on how to calculate a cost-per-fan metric to determine the campaigns return on investment (ROI). Not only the cost to acquire a fan, but the fan’s worth.

If you walk into a meeting preaching that social media shouldn’t be measured because you decided to put on pants and the other group walks into the meeting showing the ROI of individual Facebook fans and the cost per acquisition, take a wild guess who’s going to get the budget and guess who’s going to loose their pants?

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About Tac Anderson

Social media anthropologist. Communications strategist. Business model junkie. Chief blogger here at New Comm Biz.
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  • http://www.jeremymeyers.com/ Jeremy Meyers

    see the phone/pants thing is dumb in the ROI conversation, but it's important in the Trust conversation. You trust your employees to represent your company by giving them phones and the ability to talk to clients on them.

    I guess you trust them to wear pants in meetings, too.

  • http://jaysteele360.com/ jaysteele

    Tac:

    I think you are close – but still a little off the mark. We may still be in a period of time where some people think that the ROI of social media in general still needs to be determined. However, I think that is based upon lack of knowledge or understanding.

    I point to the example you gave in your blog post. Measuring the worth of a Facebook fan can be achieved. Measuring the return on social media as a system cannot. It is the use of the social media and the methods of using it that are measured.

    Going back to the examples you gave, I cannot tell you what the ROI is of your corporate phone system but if I capture the data on the usage of the phones by the marketing department staff, I could come up with a metric of the ROI of every inbound or outbound phone call from each person (telephone) in that department.

    Media is an environment. If someone is trying to determine the ROI of social media, they will be as successful as if they tried to measure the ROI of sight, hearing, or smelling. You can, however, measure the return of a YouTube video or podcast. Our role is to help leaders and decision makers in organizations know and understand this better and learn how it can be done.

    Thanks for sticking your neck out on this one. It is a very pertinent topic.

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  • http://www.newcommbiz.com tacanderson

    Great point Jay and if I wasn't on such a rant I should have stopped and thought through my examples better. (Future post maybe)

    A better comparison (because this get's to the heart of the problem) would be the examples of a company deciding to switch to an all VOIP phone system vs marketing adopting social media.

    When looking at VOIP a company would compare the overall cost savings first, then the trade-offs for voice mails forwarded to email and any perceived quality difference second. They aren't looking at support, versus marketing versus general use. It's all one bucket of funding.

    When marketing is looking at using social media cost can be an advantage but it shouldn't be the primary driver because then you're just losing resources. If you can show a greater return by using social media than you could using traditional channels you can often make the case for more/better use of resources.

    This can be done at a system wide level but the reason you don't see it yet is because social media hasn't been deployed at a whole system level *yet*. We're close but not quite there yet. Hence real examples of ROI (not hypothesis) is usually shown by individual tactics.

    Now like VOIP, the best reasons are hybrids. You get cost savings and increased returns. This is where I had the most luck when at HP.

    We're still in the early days of phone deployment where only execs and key operational roles had phones.

  • http://jaysteele360.com/ jaysteele

    Well, why didn't you say so! Actually, this new example helps to make it more clear. I like the use of the word “tactics”. The evolution of social media into the corporate environment will be accomplished through a number of small, incremental steps. One of my concerns is for the social media experts/consultants/advisors that do not understand the larger, overall strategic elements leading to systemwide adoption like we see today with telephones. They may be leading their unsuspecting followers down a path that leads nowhere.

    In re: your tweet about debating ROI, I hope you do not think I am arguing with you because I very much agree with what you are saying in principle. My original comment was initiated out of the interest of clarification (in my mind as much as anything). I enjoy reading your posts and seeing this dialog taking place.

  • http://www.newcommbiz.com tacanderson

    Well I didn't say so before because I basically made up that example right now :)

    Those who don't understand the overall strategy will be weeded out.

    Debate is not a bad word. It's not contention, argument or even disagreement. Debate is healthy, it's respectful, it's a good thing. Our industry needs to debate more.

  • http://www.markclayson.com/ Mark Clayson

    The most comprehensive info I have found on this subject on the net. Will be back soon to follow up.

  • http://www.prova.fm/advertising/ Barbara

    great blog! keep it up :)

    i have to admit that i am most of the time lost when it comes to measuring social media. right now, all i can say is that the website which was set-up by Prova works well. that's it. however, i guess i have to put in more effort to determine which tools work best.

  • http://www.virtualsocialmedia.com/social-media-marketing-optimization-services/social-media-pricing/ Social Media Cost

    The videos looks very interesting :)

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