{"id":4309,"date":"2011-02-24T10:16:37","date_gmt":"2011-02-24T09:16:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uk.cision.com\/?p=2178"},"modified":"2021-12-08T17:39:07","modified_gmt":"2021-12-08T16:39:07","slug":"roi-a-battle-for-the-soul-of-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/roi-a-battle-for-the-soul-of-social-media\/","title":{"rendered":"ROI: a battle for the soul of social media?"},"content":{"rendered":"

An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.<\/em><\/p>\n

– Marshall McLuhan<\/p>\n

As forecast, it was a punchy #CommsChat<\/a> session on Monday evening, with (me) @CisionUK<\/a> chairing a discussion around the return on investment associated with social media. \u00a0I’d hoped to look more at traditional comms measurement – and most crucially of all, integrated<\/em> comms measurement – but the conversation had other ideas.<\/p>\n

The full transcript will be available at the CommsChat<\/a> site soon: keep a particular eye out for the arguments for and against the need to report in business metrics, which are, more often than not, financial metrics. (There are others, of course<\/a>, whose importance varies according to the nature of your organisation.) I was occasionally reminded of the McLuhan quote above; but is the report-obsessed bureaucrat fending off the terrors of “real people”, or are those SMing with no concern for the bottom-line dealing only in abstraction?<\/p>\n

There was a clear consensus about using softer social metrics as KPIs. I was with those who see the point of these KPIs in their correlation with bottom-line business metrics. @LizLancs<\/a> asked bluntly:<\/p>\n

If thinking only about sales, would you set a time limit on converting a follower?<\/em><\/p>\n

To which the answer, in a certain context, is yes<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Invariably it’s not so straightforward, though. Many potentially bottom-line boosting activities will take time to manifest (think client wins based on socially acquired knowledge, or crowdsourced product developments).<\/p>\n

I’d agree that the idea that seeking to tie social media activity immediately<\/em> to monetary value is “old school marketing<\/a>“. But seeking always<\/em> to do so at some stage<\/em> should be a perennial reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him. – Marshall McLuhan As …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":289,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[865],"tags":[894,895],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4309"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/289"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4309"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137482,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4309\/revisions\/137482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}