Social Media ROI Is Unquestionable

Claims about social media ROI are mostly fluff, right? All those silly Tweets are a waste of time for a serious brand or business, right? Yeah, right. You stick with that strategy.

Matt Creamer has an article in the November 29 edition of Advertising Age suggesting that brands may be well served creating "simple, random and banal" conversation.

Blackberry's Brian Wallace* served up a great example of marketing banality. On May 4th, National Star Wars Day for those of you in the dark, Blackberry tweeted, "May the 4th Be With You." Genious, yes? Apparently, Wallace had to justify this to the people in the office. I quote from the Adage article (because this was the inspiration for this post, and the best part):

"I remember getting emails from my peers asing me why we would post such a thing and was this why we created our Twitter channel. My response was that this post reached over 150,000 people, 98% of the posts were positive, most tweets made a positive association with our brand, and it drove a 15% increase in our followers. Now what's the value of all that to our company? For the cost of $0.00 we have increased positive brand sentiment, generated a measurable earned-media value and now have 20,000+ more people who Ican share product-related information to. Not a bad ROI."

Not a bad ROI at all. Well done, Mr. Wallace. Zing! Take that! social media naysayers.

I only take issue with one aspect. The cost of that effort was not $0.00. Though his point is valid, I doubt Brian, or whoever did the tweeting, was working for free. Nevertheless, an obvious marketing bargain.

Deep Ripples is not a social media marketing company, not per se. Search marketing is our speh-she-allity. But what we are learning is that a business cannot get the most out of its online marketing efforts without an integrated approach, including site design, SEO, CRO, email, and social media (what did I miss?)

If your plan does not include all of these, it is likely you are burning cash. Our recommendation? Change your plan, or use smaller bills (the fire will last longer).

 

 

*Clarification: Brian Wallace is Vice President Media and Digital Marketing for Research In Motion, makers of the BlackBerry smartphone.

Source: http://www.deepripples.com/blog/unquestionable-social-media-roi

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