…words

Jason Falls has started a stimulating conversation on What Is The ROI For Social Media?

Measuring the return on a conversation is tricky.

The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable.

To illustrate that point for all our measurement and metric geeks out there, what you are trying to do is assign multiple choice scoring to an essay question. It’s not possible.

… “Ultimately, the key question to ask when measuring engagement is, ‘Are we getting what we want out of the conversation?’” And, as stubborn as it sounds Mr. CEO, you don’t get money out of a conversation.

To further the discussion a bit, I sat down with Katie for an episode of SME-TV, which will be added to this post later today.

What Katie evangelized a bit in her session was that the conversation (comments on your content) was the best measure of a level of engagement. Avinash Kaushik says much of the same in his discussions on web analytics. This isn’t an end-around the need for ROI, it’s the answer. Or at least a big part of the answer.

(Side note – Provided this is true, isn’t it sad that most companies haven’t even upgraded the technology used on their websites to enable commenting and conversation. Of course, it’s even more sad that if they had the technology right, they’re still afraid to use it. I digress.)

When you ask businesses why they are participating in social media, what do they say? If they say, “to make money,” then they will fail because currency in the social web is found in both relationships and content. If they say, “to grow our business,” they’re just saying, “to make money,” in a nicer way. If they say, “to participate in the conversation,” which is the more appropriate reason to be involved in the social web, then why on earth would they not measure success by the value of the conversations they have?

Stop the focus on metrics

I have to disagree with the “metric-centric” message of this post. It may be true that there is no way to quantify the conversation that takes place in the Comments section of your blog. But there is a way to measure the effectiveness of the conversation that your market is having. The tool I use for that is called “Google”, and when someone is searching for a product or service that you provide, the quantity and quality of conversation (as in links to your site, and to people talking about your business) is displayed for all of the world to see.

At the risk of breaking my arm patting myself on the back I’d like to point to an example of this, using my own “product”: the series of posts that I wrote about applying the 7 Habits of Highly Effective people at Productivity in Context (hdbizblog.com – I know, poor branding, lesson learned). Many of my readers had e-mailed asking for this kind of information, especially looking for worksheets and templates to use to learn these skills.

We had a conversation about it, and I wrote about it. Now, if you type “7 habits worksheet” into Google you will see this:

This is definitely a quantifiable result of the conversation that people are having.

Focus on fostering the conversation

When there is a conversation going on about a segment of your business, you need to get involved. As in the example above, I am in the business of helping people improve their productivity and one of the tools that I believe in is in the form of a worksheet. I make a lot of worksheets. I write about them and have conversations with my readers about them.

And some of the readers turn into clients.

Make money “because of”, not with

The “because of” effect is much more powerful than the “with” effect. One of the commenters on Jason’s post, Mack Collier (The Viral Garden), hits the nail on the head with:

…companies that are NEW to social media, wanting to use metrics and measurements that they are used to when using TRADITIONAL marketing methods to ‘get their message out there’. Their thinking is ‘how do we make money from this?’, whereas companies that have been active in this space for a while, such as Dell, understand that by PARTICIPATING that they will make more money as a BYPRODUCT of their efforts. Dell has been in the game long enough to see the impact that their efforts are making, and as a result have shifted away from the ‘how do we make money with this?’ mentality.

Attempting to DIRECTLY monetize social media efforts is the quickest way to ensure they fail. But companies that aren’t familiar with this space don’t know any better. In a few years, after more companies are more familiar with these tools, I think we’ll see them looking to INdirectly monetize their efforts, while putting the focus on SM as a way to DIRECTLY connect with their customers.

One of the best lessons that I learned from the SOBCon event that I attended in May was that blogging (and Social Media in general) should be treated like a business. That business is the marketing of your products and services & establishing yourself/your business as an authority. The goal of that business is to make money because of your blog (or Social Media efforts), instead of with your blog.

What say you?

UPDATE

David Meerman Scott addresses this question in a similar fashion in a recent presentation: