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The “Intangible” Benefits of Social Media

Posted on 29. Jan, 2009 by Pete Hollier in Social Media

The Blog Post Measuring the ROI of Social Media produced numerous responses on the Social Networks I participate in. Many of the comments were outstanding. It was clearly a popular topic and one of concern to businesses. In an effort to broaden the expertise in this topic I asked a number of the respondents to guest blog on the topic of Social Media and ROI.

Measuring the ROI of Social Media: By Pete Hollier, Social Media Consul tat at Seo Wizardry

Measuring ROI of Social Media – Another Perspective: By Mark Havenner,
Account Manager at
The Pollack PR Marketing Group

The Introduction – Olivier Riviere

Olivier Riviere is a seasoned European expert in Marketing, Communications, and Business Development. He currently works as an independent consultant www.olivier-riviere.de

The “Intangible” Benefits of Social Media

In previous posts on this blog, Pete the Wizard provided us with many tips on how to measure the outcome of a social media campaign in terms of the company’s web site traffic, leads, and sales. Let’s call this the tangible or to be more precise the immediate – or immediately visible – benefits. However, considering that marketing is (or should be) also a long term game, it is worth taking into account the intangible or, to be more precise again, the longer term benefits of a presence in social media. One could also say that we are discussing benefits that are not related to immediate revenue generation.

Social Media is also about delivering the brand experience

The elevator pitch about these “intangible” or long term benefits of social media is very simple. A good engagement on social media is part of the brand experience and supports brand building.

A strong brand makes your company more attractive to customers and to current and potential employees. In simpler words, social media can help build your company’s reputation.

A brand, either in the consumer or in the business space can always be characterized with a couple of words that describe its brand value or brand attributes. All strong brands can be described with an association of words taken, from the following list (some terms are mutually exclusive); innovative, traditional, reliable, open, friendly, approachable, predictable, outrageous, challenging, daring, humble, “like me”. Brand building campaigns and brand management aim at delivering the adequate customer experience in a repeated way, so that customers consciously or unconsciously associate the brand values to the company and its products.

Brand experience is a very tangible thing and must last over time

If you believe brand experience and brand building are vague concepts, think twice. Brand experience is what your customers feel when using your products or services AND when interacting with your company. Brand experience also starts with the experience of your own employees. If your company is  - or aspire to be – approachable, people oriented, or daring, then make it come to life to people by behaving adequately, including on the web. Because they are about open peer-to-peer sort of dialog, social media forums and tools offer a very powerful way to communicate the brand value and brand attributes. To be more matter of fact, social media are well adapted to the following (these are only examples);

• Drive internal discussion between employees and/or with the management
• Support collaborative exchange within a project team or any group who is motivated at sharing knowledge and experience
• Create awareness, for example with a good content, preferably a video or webcast rather than text
• Enable and facilitate discussions with customers and potential customers on product feedback, product definition, product roadmap, or customer support
• Make a company and/or part of its staff recognized members of a community
• Drive thought leadership via facilitation of valuable discussions  – this one uses social media with a classic goal of marketing and communications BUT the execution must be very subtle in order to adapt to the rules and etiquette of social media: a peer to peer dialog

All the above listed activities – and potentially many others – contribute to giving a company, a face, a voice, and a personality. Being part of existing forums, or opening and facilitating forums for stakeholders, is part of the brand experience. If done properly, it builds brand equity (= your company’s good reputation). It can even build Advocacy, which means that people are willing to speak positively about you both in a proactive or reactive way. An absolute pre-requisite for your social media activities to have a positive impact is for them to be authentic. Social media is not here to help damage control. If you have a problem of any sort (product quality, governance, human resources) you really need to fix it. However, you can use social media to be transparent, explain the situation and communicate what you are doing about it. Doing so will limit the influence of negative comments, reduce rumors, and probably motivate some people to speak for you. On the contrary, attempts for manipulation will be paid cash as shown by many examples already.

A measurable impact

The long term effect of social media, that we initially called the intangible benefits, is in fact quite tangible and is most often measurable.

As a simple example, if social media is used to manage a dialog with employees or within a project group whose members are spread across continents, it is very easy to check the benefits by asking people via a web poll or interviews.

Social Media is used to feed conversations on the web and reach a wide audience by leveraging the “long tail” concept (conversations being conveyed to many other forums), measurement implies the usage of very specific and relatively new techniques. There are quite a few paid services available to monitor and analyze conversations on the web. These services allow a qualitative and quantitative  analysis of how discussions on your company or your topics of interest spread over the internet. A recent article written by Dan Schwabei and published on Mashable  (http://mashable.com/2008/12/29/brand-reputation-monitoring-tools/ ) provides a very good concise description of 10 of them.

Last but not least, if social media are part of a global plan combining different tactics and tools, the overall benefit can still be assessed via classical market research techniques (including online). Of course, it might be difficult to assess separately the impact of a specific tactic but this methodology problem is not new and exists with PR or other marketing tactics.

All in all, when designing a social media campaign, you should have a clear idea of your target group and of the expected short term and longer term impact (nothing really new). Even if you need some quick wins and rapid revenue generating effect (otherwise you don’t get a budget), think also for the long term. If you want social media to become a quite usual element of your company’s marketing toolbox, you’d better invest some time into building a realistic step by step strategy, and think on how to best sell the concept within your company.

Guest Blogs

If you would like to be a Guest Blogger on any SEO / SEM topic please email your suggestion to pete@seowizardy.ca I look forward to hearing from you.

More from SeoWizardry

• Measuring the ROI of Social Media
• The Tools of Social Media
• The Secondary Social Media Tools
• Initiating Business Social Media
• Measuring ROI of Social Media – Another Perspective

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