frankly speaking

Winning at Social Media

“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

- Vince Lombardi

There’s been a lot confusion recently about how to properly define winning at social media. Some people like to use platitudes like  engaging users, social influencers, quality versus quantity posts and pointing at engagement as an indirect way to grow revenue.  Forrester even went so far as do an entire blog post about how companies should look at more than just the dollar ROI to measure the real return on a social media campaign.

This is all great, and important, but to me, misses the point. Let’s be clear - the focus for ANY marketing channel is to drive revenue. In order for the channel to be successful, the revenue generated from this channel must be more than the cost of generating the revenue.

Think about it, if you went to an investor and told him “Well, our company gets a lot of traffic, and people sure do like us, and they blog about us alot and we talk with them about products on facebook and twitter, but unfortunately, they don’t seem to be buying a lot and we missed our revenue target for the quarter.”  Do you really think the investor is going to give a damn about how many users you engaged on Twitter or Facebook, or the fact that you were able to get Kevin Rose to retweet your blog post?  The short answer is no, he’s really not going to care. He will care, very much so, that resources weren’t allocated better to channels that were driving revenue.

I’m not saying that engaging customers and potential customers, reaching out to social influencers, blogging, participating in forums and using video isn’t important, because it is, it’s very important. But, at the end of the day, all of those things don’t pay the bills, nor do they increase shareholder value.

So, what does it take to win at social media? Like any marketing channel it takes testing, analyzing the data and making the appropriate changes to see what delivers the maximum amount of value for the least amount of cost. Engaging users, working with influencers, blogging, creating a viral app or video all help with taking your social media and marketing programs to the next level.