Social Customer Support delivers Strong ROI
Paul Dunay is an award-winning B2B marketing expert with more than 20 years’ success in generating demand and creating awareness for leading technology, consumer products, financial services and professional services organizations.
Paul is the global vice president of marketing for Maxymiser a leading web optimization firm, and author of four “Dummies” books: Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley 2009), Social Media and the Contact Center for Dummies (Wiley Custom Publishing 2010), Facebook Advertising for Dummies (Wiley 2010) and Facebook Marketing for Dummies 2nd Edition (Wiley 2011).
His unique approach to marketing has led to recognition of Paul as a BtoB Magazine Top 25 B2B Marketer of the Year for 2010 and 2009 and winner of the DemandGen Award for Utilizing Marketing Automation to Fuel Corporate Growth in 2008. He is also a finalist for the last six years in a row in the Marketing Excellence Awards competition of the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA), and is a 2010 and 2005 gold award winner in Driving Demand.
Buzz Marketing for Technology, Paul’s blog, has been recognized as a Top 20 Marketing Blog for 2009 and 2008, a Top Blog to Watch for 2009 and 2008, and an Advertising Age Power 150 blog in the “Daily Ranking of Marketing Blogs.”
Paul has shared his marketing thought leadership as a featured speaker for the American Marketing Association, BtoB Magazine, CMO Club, MarketingProfs, Marketing Sherpa, Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG), and ITSMA. He has appeared on Fox News, and his articles have been featured in BusinessWeek, The New York Times, BtoB Magazine, MarketingProfs and MarketingSherpa.
Paul holds an Executive Certificate in Strategy and Innovation from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a bachelor’s degree in Marketing and Computer Science from Ithaca College.
This is a great post that brings up some very interesting points. Social media is a great way to monitor and respond to customer service issues, and it’s good to see that businesses are starting to understand the benefit of using various social media platform to speak directly to their target audiences.
It’s important to note that there are solid ways to measure social media’s value (you can even apply some of the more traditional measurement tactics!) It’s really about setting the metrics and goals, implementing the necessary back-end technology (web analytics, tracking etc.), and setting parameters for the entire campaign prior to launch.
If you know what you want to achieve on social media, then rest-assured there is a way to track it’s ROI.
@Katie – I agree – I think people focus too much on the individual tool rather than the approach – which is why tracking ROI become hard for them
Amazing how many people do not investigate their marketing beforehand and equally shocking is how many do not follow up to see their ROI… Why work hard at it?
“To calculate ROI, the benefit (return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment; the result is expressed as a percentage or a ratio.”
What is the ROI of a handshake? The ROI of meeting people at a social event?
The answer: It’s impossible to really know.
Well, partially. It is possible to measure and optimize the transactional values of social activity:
– That handshake cost me approximately $20 (time, travel, etc.) and didn’t earn me any money in the following 3 months, so ROI was 0% (($0-$20)/$20).
– Meeting those people at that social event cost me $10 and resulted in $40 of sales, so ROI there was 300% (($40-$10)/$10).
See where this is going? Calculating ROI for these social activities totally misses (if not devalues) the point of such social: relationships.
What is the relationship value of such events?
– That handshake cost me no relationship value, and earned me tremendous relationship value. Now that person and I are close friends, and he recommends my services to all his colleagues.
– Meeting those people at that social event cost me nothing (save opportunity cost, perhaps). It earned me a lifelong trusted advisor role with two of the guests.
People — especially businesspeople who’ve studied finance — like nice objective values. It helps to compare things. And that’s important when comparing avenues of expenditure. But objective valuation is only part of an honest evaluation. The subjective matters as well — in particular with human beings who are proven to act irrationally based on subjective criteria, including hiring people “they know” rather than non-vetted service providers.
Successful activity on social media follows the same rules. Focus on relationship value. That’s where the meat is. Transactional value of social media activity is just data.
IMHO,
Glenn Friesen
ILS Consultants
@Glenn – thanks for submitting some really in depth thought on this space – I was looking at it clearly more functionally but I can appreciate your angle of trying to quantify the unquantifyable!