future travel: Logic is Variable: Cashing in social capital

Trapping Social Media Capital (ROI) appeared in Profit, Pakistan Today, July 14, 2011 issue

Going social with your message and taking advantages of social media platforms where users throng is the order of the day. The popularity of social media cannot be debated but it is important for any online enterprise to understand how to make use of multiple social media channels and more importantly, what is the return on investments in the forms of time and money.

Internet is a lonely place without social media. It is near impossible to surf the Internet today without hearing about social media. While the majority of Internet marketers have been busy utilizing digital advertising, SEO, PPC and other online tools to promote their businesses, some others have also been using and benefiting from social media long before trend watchers predicted user-generated content to have a profound impact on businesses. Savvy marketers are going a long way to gain access to additional audiences and a deeper reach into their existing communities through social media channels.

Earlier this year, two studies have been released and both show totally opposite findings. As per the 2011 Industry Report from Social Media Examiner, ?90 percent of more than 3,000 Web marketers say that social media is an important facet of their business today. Brand exposure was identified as the greatest benefit, with 88 percent of respondents citing it as a positive result of their social media campaigns.? On the other hand, the research released by ForeSee Results states, ?on average, less than 1 percent of website visits come directly from a social media URL. ForeSee surveyed 300,000 consumers on more than 180 websites across multiple industries to come up with that number, which sounds like an awfully poor return on a company?s investment of both time and resources.? So, go for social media or not is the question.

From a marketing viewpoint, social media not only helps get your message in front of your intended audiences but also extend your reach, making it easier to promote and sell your products or services. It is one more tool all online marketers should have in their marketing arsenal or at least on their radar. For many however, social media is more than just the future of online marketing and already the primary means of exposure and millions are taking full advantage of it right now.

When it comes to social networking, there are literally hundreds of services available ? Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Plus, to name just a few. In fact, any site that allows conversational interaction is a prime venue for the rapidly growing fields of social media. With millions of users and billions of monthly page views, no business, large or small, can ignore social media anymore, notwithstanding myths that social media sites are only hangouts for teens and that the Facebook and Twitter generation is young. This fear may be keeping many businesses from joining social media. While there is certainly a large segment of social media users that fit the commonly believed type, that theory is becoming outdated fast. More businesses are joining the fray every day and the social media crowd is not as young as you may think. Increasingly, businesses are stepping up, establishing their own profiles, and promoting them in the social media population. There are certainly some challenges in social media promotion in local context, but the benefits are evident and abundant.

What are the benefits and can they actually be measured? This is one of the most common questions among marketing folks and the other side - the one who pays for marketing efforts. Everyone wants number for any marketing campaigns. Let me say that there are no numbers in social media game. And let me confess that social media is hard to be measured in plain numbers. The fact that social media marketing return on investment (ROI) is hard to measure is another reason that has prevented many businesses to jump on social media board. There are some analysts out there who argue that it is possible to measure social media marketing ROI, but what they are measuring is no actually ROI as such. ROI is literally a monetary measurement. Counting how many blog comments, Facebook fans, Twitter followers and retweets and friends in Google Plus circles (a whole new concept of targeted grouping launched in Pakistan in June 2011) a business gets is possible but that is not really measuring ROI since none of these things specifically correlate with the amount of leads a business gets.

That does not mean that social media does not contribute to the bottom line. It certainly does. Social media is a great way to attract and hold attention and build relationships with potential customers, clients, prospects, and other stakeholders. A lead may generate from corporate blog, via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Google Plus or vice versa.

Best would be to you utilize as many social media channels that are available and use them all together because no one can say what will prompt consumer to make a buying decision. Putting all social media efforts together and effectively managing social media operations can earn any business a significant social capital. Social capital as per Pierre Bourdieu - a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher - ultimately contributes to economic capital.

Labels: Business, Pakistan Today, Profit, Social Media

posted by sAJs @ 1:16 PM,