I had the opportunity to write an article for MediaPost yesterday titled: “Is the Promise of Social Media Enough? What About ROI?“ The premise for the article is that social media is clearly changing how businesses can do business, but is this promise of change enough for companies to really adopt social technologies? Should we just disregard ROI all together and just say that “companies must be social?” There are some awesome comments on the site which I highly recommend that you check out. I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on the article as it is clearly a hot topic (evidenced by the amount of discussion on the MediaPost site). Here’s a snippet to entice you:
“I’m sitting at the 140 Conference in L.A. and have just finished listening to the CMO of Kodak and the VP of marketing for Virgin America talk about the value of their Twitter and social media usage. Both executives clearly understand the value of social media and connecting with their customers and fans. Kodak’s Jeffrey Hayzlett explained how Kodak was able to name its new product based on suggestions from Twitter. Virgin America’s Porter Gale shared several stories of how her company’s social media usage helped retain existing customers.
There’s something missing, though: ROI. Let’s start off by defining exactly what ROI is: gain from investment minus cost of investment, then divided by cost of investment. ROI is a financial metric, which means it deals with the amount of money that is invested vs. the amount of money that is returned, in dollars.”
Please visit MediaPost to check out the rest of the article and leave a comment there along with the other smart folks! Very special thanks to David Berkowitz for introducing media to Phyllis from MediaPost!
