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“Democratizing” social media allows organizations to leverage employees, customers, vendors and other brand influencers to stretch social capacity – expanding the content and communication base to help nurture awareness, influence, engagement and action.
This visual was inspired by an interview with Scott Monty, social media trailblazer at Ford. He brings up a great point about the challenges presented by time and scale – to be successful, social media needs to be channeled across the whole organization…not through just one person or department.
Sometimes we get so engrossed with the social tools that we forget about the quality of the content we add to the stream. After getting called out on Twitter for my use of Foursquare, I decided to produced this video tip about adding value to your online conversations.
This visual illustrates the way I describe opposing Social ROI “parties” to clients.
My personal opinion is that metrics are important. But I also believe that not everything you do needs to have a firm number attached to it to make it beneficial to your business.
This most recent point was pounded home in a classic Social ROI rant by David Meerman Scott. Two things David said really resonated with me:
Most companies don’t measure ROI (actual return on investment) with their existing marketing programs. For example, how many organizations know the real return of print ads, PR campaigns, press releases, trade shows, brochures, etc?
The ROI chatter masks a fear of the unknown. Businesses that don’t (or choose not to) understand social media discount its value based on the ROI argument – while continuing to spend on old marketing that, in most cases, is not measurable either.
This short video visualizes 10 social media concepts including social capacity, social tools, social media strategy, engagement, social listening, etc.
A special thanks to A.M. for permission to use “Aldwych Ave.”, a great tune off “Today is…” Check him out at http://www.musicbyam.com
One of my plans for 2010 is to start adding some video content to the blog – simple productions like the one here, video posts/rants/comments, interviews, etc.
I’d love to get your comments…are you interested in seeing this type of content? Any other suggestions?
This image was inspired by a great post (Amber Naslund) that helps articulate the role of social media practitioners.
It’s not necessarily the responsibility of consultants to convince ill-prepared organizations (not ready, lacking social capacity, etc.) to implement social media programs.
Our role, for those organizations that have “the mindset, if not the framework”, is to help build a social business model that aligns tools/technology with business objectives by acting as a:
A social culture shift has the power to elevate your organization by facilitating:
internal/external connectivity
the need to deeply understand your audience (the precursor to community development)
a collaborative approach to managing your brand
But how do we get there?
The Next Step for Social Media
We’re in the early stages of social media strategy – there are still far too many practitioners preaching use of the tools without a connection to objectives, metrics, ROI…or fundamental business strategy.
How to we reach the goal of building social business models? Tom Webster at Brand Savant had some great thoughts in a recent blog post titled What’s Wrong with Social Media Strategy:
“Social media’s next act has to be through the corporate HR director’s door, and ultimately the CEO’s door. To get there, however, social media has to prove itself by more readily embracing effectiveness metrics (not just statistics) to raise its profile in the organization. Give the CEO the numbers to justify continued social media engagement, and that engagement will continue–and ultimately be the Trojan horse for what human business can become.”
What do you think? What are some of the challenges of delivering on the promise of social media?
“Content is King” has become a common expression in marketing circles – so when I came across Chris Brogan’s Content is Not King blog post, it really resonated with me.
We may discount (or forget) the importance of our part of the engagement process. Building a community takes smarts, guts and passion…you need to put yourself out there. Your content comes alive through this process…not the other way around.
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