This is the part of my toonblog from Scott Stratten’s BlogWorld keynote that keeps getting mentioned by people, so I thought I’d offer it on its own after seeing Scott’s tweet yesterday.
Updated: A few thoughts about poor, maligned and misused ROI. Or, Seven Things (Off the Top Of My Head) That I Believe:
- I believe in measuring, benchmarking, testing, comparing and assessing. I believe in doing your best to surface the tangible financial results from an organization’s investments in any field, including social media. But…
- I believe it’s easy to confuse that which can be measured with that which matters… and that, when you’re dealing with human relationships, there’s a lot that both matters tremendously and resists simple measurement. (See also “Schools, Standardized testing”.) But…
- I believe that Belief #2 isn’t a reason not to try. Social media isn’t free, and any responsible communicator wants to use their organization’s resources to maximum effect. But…
- It is a reason to keep your attempts to measure outcomes in some perspective. And…
- It’s a reason not to get so hung up on quantitative data that you miss out on the qualitative benefits of having decent, respectful relationships with people – online and offline. Or that you wind up sounding less like a human being than a not-terribly-clever marketing algorithm.
- I believe there are very smart people who’ve thought about this more than I have.
- I believe it’s time for tea.
1 Comment
Great tongue-in-cheek kidding-on-the-square moment. I have given this a lot of thought: take airlines for example: Does Southwest really gain more passengers by being on Twitter and really interacting with people? I like Christi a lot better than that one dude behind United Airlines (who never responds to my Tweet even though "I HAVE STATUS on UA and My husband is 1K") but does it change my buying behavior? Or shoes. I like Zappos A LOT. I love how they respond to your tweets with a great sense of humor (without worrying about the affect on their corporate image by communicating with someone who is deliberately and obviously left-leaning, liberal, crazy with a potty mouth — THAT "Not worried about corporate image" is exactly their corporate image). But shoes are shoes are shoes. Zappos never gives out coupon codes so when I can get 25% off from their competitors, I buy from their competitors (while feeling like a traitor).
For some companies/industries though, the COOL factor may be quite substantial even though it cannot be materially measured.