Most of us will agree that social media marketing is great, but.....

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Arik Flanders on April 17, 2009 at 7:23am

Regarding your previous post about tracking social media with Google Analytics, I agree analytics is a fairly good way to track SOME of your social media efforts. I have used analytics for years now and believe to understand it's capabilities quite well. We track and chart all in bound links, set up goals, reports, etc., however, even when you compare how much time you spend daily on social media (i.e. your calendar) there is still not an accurate way to track EVERYTHING. For example you cannot evaluate how many potential or current customers are emailing your direct link through a blog article that they just read to one of their friends. Also, many of our members will read or here about us from a non-linked article, blog, forum, etc., then considering that link cannot be tracked they will either go direct by typing in our url or they will use a search engine, which will inappropriately track them as coming from search, when in all reality they came from a blog. These are only just a few examples.

I hope this makes since about not being able to 100% accuratly track your social media marketing. Therefore, at this point you cannot correctly track your ROI for it. Although I will agree that online marketing is far superior in terms of trackability compared to other traditional mediums.

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by David Mark on April 18, 2009 at 12:34pm

@Ben Well stated.

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Jeff Zuber on April 16, 2009 at 11:21pm

Eric is correct that there are many good tools to use to track click thrus, landing pages and all of the relevant items that go into calculating a ROI. However the problem in this discussion is that what defines ROI has changed as technoloy has changed. In the hayday of broadcast advertising no one could remotely calculate a return on investment. If you ran 40 spots and your phone rang more that was considered successfull.

Look at the direct mail industry. The DMA (Direct Marketing Association) studies have found that direct mail campaigns with a projected open rate of 1.5 percent is a success. And they have no concrete way to know if they were actually opened. With e-marketing you can very easily track open rates and clicks to different areas in a marketing message.

Social media is a different can of worms. Technology gives us many more ways to track what and where users go in our sites. Blogs and forums about a product and services are even easier, If I post about a product or service and 50 people respond and I see that 11 are current customers that's some pretty valuable info.

My point is that tracking ROI in any media form is 80 percent science and 20 percent intuition.

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Jeff Zuber on April 17, 2009 at 2:40pm

Chris you are probably closer to the mark than my guesstimate. The great thing about it is that thanks to technology it is better tracked than older mainstream forms of advertising. Even institutions like Neilson haven't had a handle on ROI for advertisers in over thirty years. So while Google, Stat Counter etc. do have their flaws they can give you a much clearer picture of ROI than ever before.

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Chris Lucas on April 17, 2009 at 11:11am

Back to the original question - though the debate about ROI is interesting to watch.

Social media platforms are losing money because there is no good revenue model. The approach of build it and they will come is a great one...if you aren't looking to actually make money. Sure online advertising is on the rise but you can't make as much money with online advertising as you can in the offline world - ask the newspapers.

One of two things are going to happen. You are going to see Social Media platforms swallowed up by larger companies like Google etc. who can eat those losses but make it up elsewhere or you are going to see subscription based models. The problem is that once you give something away it is harder to charge for it on the back end.

So my guess is that you will have a severe consolidation of platforms under one or two larger companies and many of these niche sites will simply vanish or become obsolete. From a marketers perspective I think it will be easier to manage and build your presence. Things will become more consolidated making tracking, building a consistent brand/message/voice, and interacting with your customers/users much easier.

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Arik Flanders on April 17, 2009 at 11:51am

I will agree with your assessment.

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Arik Flanders on April 20, 2009 at 7:58am

Ha ha! I know it's kind of scary.

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Chris Baggott on April 17, 2009 at 2:41pm

We need to keep in mind that a few people have made statements like "Online advertising is on the rise"

At best this is debatable and at worst it's not true. Interruption advertising isn't working any better online than it works in old media. Remember 1997 when everyone was sucking up Ad Networks at multi-billion valuations? (Google buying doublclick, Microsoft buying Aquantive) Those are looking like horrible investments now because the advertisers are finding that they are not getting the results they expected and dramatically pulling back.

My point is that an Ad model is not going to be enough to salvage social networks. I don't know what the answer is, but as a marketer I'm focusing a lot more energy on the media that are growing and have a sustainable business model: Email and Search.

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Justin Bryant on April 19, 2009 at 10:41pm

Chris, I use emarketer.com as a tool as well. Yet, I find other studies that contradict this! The truth with will shake out in the wash though!

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Justin Bryant on April 19, 2009 at 10:39pm

Arrick, many plans in place... Old West my friend, it'll get there. Question is, when it get's there, what we be relevant?

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Matt Barnett on April 20, 2009 at 10:21am

As far as the future existence of social platforms, it is hyper-critical for anyone interested in selling anything (white goods, services, etc.) to be building their online cred through blogs, micro-blogs, social bookmarking and facebooks/myspaces now because that will be what the next-generation of technologies will be drawing upon for information. And this next-generation is coming up faster than you think. In fact, simple, cheap and highly meaurable technologies like QR are already out there. It's only a matter of (a short) time before these are incorporated into or rely on the info from social media platforms

Two examples:
Twitter and RFID
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&...

Web 3.0 preview? (takes a moment for the video to play, but you've never seen anything like it.)
http://tinyurl.com/cr6uzk

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Lois Cutress on April 26, 2009 at 4:11am

I have never been too much of fan of facebook etc, but nowadays it seems necessary.

▶ Reply to This

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• Next ›
• Page