Content, Conversation – and a question of ROI
Posted on | October 22, 2009 | 3 Comments
This has been a busy week and an interesting journey into the world of Social Media. I was glad to hear a consensus on the importance of having good content and on developing conversations and also in the development of communication that engages people around their own interests rather than forcing them to move to the agenda of the communicator.
On Friday, I went to Like Minds (#likeminds), a conference (or maybe an unconference) about ROI and Social Media. Social Media has a buzz about it and the event was at capacity (around 200). The speakers had come from the US, from London and from much nearer to the venue in the centre of Exeter. There were equally well-travelled people in the audience.
In the aftermath, there is much debate and not a little confusion about ROI. I thought Olivier Blanchard (@thebrandbuilder) explained ROI very well. It is about cost reduction or profit increase set against the costs of achieving that result. To me, ROI is a much more global concept and is best viewed across departmental or Company performance rather than against one activity.
Social Media covers so many areas of business and personal communications that it is difficult to put it into one box. The value of having ‘colleagues’ who are there with you in real time is difficult to quantify when working in isolation in today’s increasingly devolved work environment not to mention the resource at your fingertips on so many topics and the discoveries that can be made daily from links and retweets.
In a Business context, I believe Social Media comes into the catergory of early stage Marketing – awareness, market research, audience building and R&D – rather than a selling tool. So what we might look at is the Opportunity Cost of Social Media versus other similar activities and against activities further down the pipeline. As an example, Frank Furness talks about having to do cold calls as being the cost of not asking for enough referrals. So Social Media, as Olivier suggested needs to be funded out of one of the existing buckets in this area of Marketing.
In a commercial context, a business has goals for turnover and the sales that make that up come from a pipeline that converts, usually with considerable wastage as people qualify out, contacts into prospects and prospects into sales. So, there should be, across all methods of acquiring, a number of new potential clients that will deliver that turnover. How many new contacts are needed in each method of acquisition and over what timescale will be dependent on the ratio of potential clients to actual conversions and the average time taken to close the business with them.
How effective is Social Media in delivering good prospects into this process? Trey Pennington (@treypennington) at Likeminds talked about engaging people in conversation and then moving those people along a process that might lead to business. Time will tell how effective Social Media is at doing this, but it is something that businesses are, quite rightly, exploring. As they get more data, they will either move further into Social Media use or withdraw and try something else.
For some businesses, the concept of Opportunity Cost is irrelevant anyway as Social Media champions in their businesses are extending their hours to add in their activity rather than doing it in salaried hours and for those of us in self-employment, it is just another unpaid task that we fit in if we believe that Social Media works for us.
Scott Gould (@scottgould), in a blog post, talked about his approach to Like Minds. He described how he builds a platform around the people and gives them a place they can talk. Whilst this is dangerously close to a ‘build it and they will come’ theory, it does seem to work and it is equally true about any communication. You need to know your audience and engage with them on their home ground both in terms of the content and context of the communication.
At Cornwall Social Media Café (@csmc) last night, Lloyd Davis (@lloyddavis), founder of the London Social Media Café (or Tuttle Club (#tuttle) as it is known) also talked about creating a platform, in this case a regular time and place where you can drop in and have coffee with likeminded people. The Tuttle club is a self-organising group with little or no agenda and no obligations placed on members. The concept is, however, developing into consulting where Lloyd takes the equivalent of a Tuttle meeting into a client and uses conversations to explore possibilities around a brief. The process of building such a group and developing outcroppings from it takes time but it is important in his view not to impose any expectations on the group.
I gave a presentation to my Breakfast Networking Group today on the two ‘old cons’ of Marketing – content and context – and the ‘newer con’ of equal importance – conversation. It came from my thinking over years and was informed by many of the things I learned or confirmed this week. I’ve covered some of the ground here and more will develop in later posts.
In that model, I see Social Media (of all types) as part of the Conversation and as just one of the Contexts for delivering your Content to your audience. Content needs to be consistent, effective and engaging and this requires stories. Stories connect with us at a deep level and we learn and are influenced by them all of the time.
All of that is a little undigested and I expect that the learning of the next and subsequent weeks will continue to develop and refine my thinking.
For now, however, it is time to turn this over for conversation. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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3 Responses to “Content, Conversation – and a question of ROI”
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October 22nd, 2009 @ 4:02 pm
I agree,
Having delivered a seminar at the Business SouthWest exhibition last week I was thinking about people’s reasons for being there. There were very few exhibitors who had exhibited last year, or in 2007 and I think part of the reason for that may be that they had not developed their strategy for attending.
Exhibiting at a Business to Business event is, to my mind at the start of the marketing process – awareness raising and, most importantly, starting conversations. Walking around the exhibition it was sometimes difficult to actually engage the stand personnel in a conversation. At other times it was difficult to walk past without being accosted with discount offers or sales pitches.
I also think that the fundamental mistake people make when networking is to see it as a sales opportunity – it is not. It is a conversation opportunity, an opportunity to build relationships and increase your creativity by talking to other people from other organisations – who may not have a need for your product/service. I have often been approached by people at networking events who, after a brief conversation and having realised that I am not about to buy their product wander off to someone else they’ve targeted. What a missed opportunity for understanding, relationship building and ideas generation.
I had at least 2 good ideas listening to Lloyd Davis last night which were certainly not linked to the tuttle club, or even Social Media which I almost certainly would not have had if I hadn’t been at the Social Media Cafe.
Get out there and chat! it’s not wasted time, it could be the most important random conversation you ever have and if you’re attempting to calculate ROI of all your conversations, you’re not thinking creatively enough.
October 22nd, 2009 @ 4:16 pm
Martin
Particularly agree about Business South West. However, I did come away with a ticket for Like Minds courtesy of Dave Thomas (Bluegrass IT) who was presenting on the Friday morning. So it wasn’t all bad. Just a lot of it!
October 22nd, 2009 @ 4:21 pm
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