Social Media ROI

eMarketer had a terrific report today about social media ROI.  The fact is more businesses are employing social media marketing every day.  The problem is they are not doing in a strategic or systematic way.  Seems we are in a hurry to implement new things as we hear about them…but often do not even know what we are doing it or how it fits our overall stragic plan.

I remember when I was at Clearspring Technologies, a leading widget syndication company, and a major media partner called me and said he MUST get an app. on Facebook right away.  I asked him why and he could only answer because the just opened up their platform to apps and needed to be there.  Now I understand why a company may want to be a leader and certainly understand the importance of experimenting in this new space. But don’t you think that with a little planning you could think through how you could actually deploy something that supports your other marketing activity and even find ways to measure results?

The key in this new marketing world is making sure you have the right strategy (including targeted keywords and phrases) and then implementing many different programs in the distributed web that support that strategy.  Measurement is the lifeblood of this new marketing word because at the end of they day, the number of opportunities you will have to communicate with prospective customers in endless. You must know what is working and what is a waste of time or social media marketing will be and endless burden on you and your team.

We will do a post shortly about measurement techniques to help the discussion.