Social Media Has Poor ROI (Strikethrough)

In a previous blog post I made the audacious claim that social media sites like Twitter and Facebook have poor ROI. Then, in a following post, I argued that we should reconceptualize "ROI" for social media, perhaps renaming the acronym "Return on Information" or "Return on Influence." Clearly, our SEO team has been struggling in a back and forth way to understand relative strengths and weaknesses of social media with respect to business success.

Now, I am back over the fence. Recent happenings on one of our client Twitter feeds we manage has caused me to recant on my earlier claim that social media delivers poor ROI.

Yesterday, several things came together for me in a weird sort of serendipity. My client is about to publish a new holiday product, and I started a conversation about the product on his Twitter feed. Immediately I got several responses from enthusiastic, interested followers. "Sounds awesome!", "How can I get in on that!", and "You're on a roll today!" were just a few of the responses.

So, in an almost Taoist go-with-the-flow sort of way, carried away by the energy of the moment, I put together an online marketing promotion. It was quick, spur of the moment, not planned or thought out. I told our followers that if they download the client's toolbar, they would be the first to know about the special - via their desktop. (The toolbar has a Java API that enables me to send a desktop alert.)

"The next group to receive the news will be our Facebook fans," I continued "So, if you miss the toolbar update, you might wanna go ahead and start following us on Facebook because this will be the next round of updates."

The third group to be updated would be our Twitter followers, I explained. "After that, it'll be open to the general public and it's anybody's game."

All this promoting (marketing?) will happen before I publish the package on the main website. And before I send the deal out to our email subscriber list.

Incredibly, the "buzz" of this not-planned out, spur of the moment, "promotion" was astonishing. Engagement and response levels went through the ceiling; Twitterers were coming out of the woodworks to follow my client, to get in on the action. There was a dense air of expectancy that caused me to pause, seriously, to think about what had just happened.

And all this occurred in the timespan of 10 minutes, at the most!

*The Import
My PR Manager, Susan Marie, is a raving Twitter fan. She believes that Twitter will become the next big search engine and will revolutionize news production. She has been researching everything Twitter and is composing a position paper on the subject, the first draft of which I have reviewed. Her thesis is that Twitter mastery will be the next big thing in SEO best practices. I, on the other hand, am not yet sold on this.

But yesterday's exchange has caused me to step back from previous positions I've held. It is obvious that there is tremendous power in what we did through Twitter yesterday. In a span of minutes we generated "buzz", garnered a bunch of new followers, got several more folks to install our toolbar, got others to fan us on facebook ...

I mean, there IS a return on investment here; it is undeniable. Precisely quantifying that ROI may be impossible, but you can "feel" that it is there and that it is good, in a marketing sense. Intuitively, one can sense that a step forward for marketing and customer relations management took place.

And perhaps we've finally figured out how to "put it all together" with social media? I'm not sure, but I think we're getting closer. At any rate, I think now I am compelled to rescind my former comments on the poor ROI of social media!

In fact, I'm going to go check my social media profiles for this client right now :)

Sent from my T-Mobile Dash

Eric Bryant, Director
Gnosis Arts
22 Ray Court
Bedminster, NJ 07921
908.787.3475
www.gnosisarts.com