Labcast: Social Media ROI and What Really Matters

Tom Johansmeyer, Group Marketing Director with The Cross Border Group, calls in to talk about some of the ways organizations can truly measure the business value of social media in online marketing. (A hint? It’s more about sales conversions than retweets and likes.)

Social Media ROI and What Really Matters

Like this podcast? Check out our previous episode with Brian Solis on the business value of social influence.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Brendan Cournoyer: Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of Labcast. Today we’re joined by Tom Johansmeyer, Group Marketing Director at The Cross Border Group, an international financial publisher and events organizer. Tom, thanks very much for joining us today.

Tom Johansmeyer: Thank you for having me.

Brendan: So, before we get started, I’d just love to give you a chance to introduce yourself and tell folks a little about The Cross Border Group.

Tom: Thank you. The Cross Border Group is, as you mentioned, an international financial publisher. We’ve got two magazines:  IR magazine, which focuses on global investor relations issues; and Corporate Secretary, which is a tool for people in the corporate governance and compliance space.

Brendan: So today, Tom, we’re going to talk a little bit about an interesting topic. ROI is always an interesting topic. We’re going to talk a little bit about how ROI pertains to social media and social media analytics. This is an interesting topic, because I think it’s sometimes sort of a hard sell really, making that full on social media investment in organizations. But it’s not just a social media thing. Marketing in general, I think, has always had that issue with finding those measurable metrics to present to CEOs and senior leaders. Isn’t that right?

Tom: It’s true, and it’s something we address every day here at Cross Border, and it’s something in my previous experiences has been an issue as well. The days of being able to do pure brand marketing seem to be in the past, where today, you really do have to be able to put a good number against anything, even if you’re just investing time, let alone capital.

Brendan: Certainly. Then with social media it becomes very tricky. First of all, it’s still relatively new to a lot of people. How do you assess the value of a tweet, of a re-tweet, stuff like that? It’s difficult but there are ways to kind of go in and you can actually see the value that you’re gaining from some of the engagement and social media avenues you’re taking, whether it’s LinkedIn, whether it’s Twitter, whether it’s Facebook. What are some of the avenues that you can tell people about, as far as kind of measuring some of the actual return on investment from social media?

Tom: What’s funny is I actually take a lot of the measurement of social media effectiveness off the social media platforms themselves. If I’m doing Facebook content to drive sales opportunities, for example, I’m more inclined to see who clicks through to a landing page or otherwise enters my sale cycle via Facebook, than I am to count the number of likes and comments that are left. The same goes for Twitter and for corporate blogs as well. You can accumulate traffic on a corporate blog. You can accumulate followers and retweets. You can accumulate likes. But at the end of the day, the metrics you really want are the true business engagement metrics. So, how many people have registered for your newsletter, registered and downloaded a white paper, contacted you for more information, or gone the full way and actually completed a transaction with you?

Brendan: Yeah. I was actually having this discussion this morning with someone, talking about how they can actually look and see whether or not these content strategies that they’re getting involved in are actually working. I said a newsletter is a good example. If someone signs up for a newsletter, that’s a lead. That’s how publishing companies do it. That’s when they’re guaranteeing leads for advertisers and stuff like that. If you cut that out, cut out that middleman and create your own content for a targeted audience, you send that newsletter out there, that’s a lead for every subscriber you have. I mean, that’s value right there.

Tom: Absolutely. This is the sort of thing we do with for some of our advertisers, as you mentioned, every day. We don’t just give them the leads. We try and drill in and talk a little bit more about the topics that are trending and which areas of our online publications are generating the most play. That way, they can align their brands with where the action is in their community. So if you’re an IR or a financial PR agency and there’s a lot of action happening on the crisis communication section of our website, Inside Investor Relations, you’ll probably want to align your brand with that section so that every time a crisis com story comes up, you’re going to see that, okay, wow, here’s the problem, and the ad proposes a solution.

The same thing can be put into play on corporate blogs as well. If you’re a financial company or a technology company and you’re working in different verticals, you’ll have a category for each of those different verticals on your blog. You might want to start aligning your products with the sections, both through content and through non-content visual elements, to reinforce the brand of your products and to specifically drive engagement.

Brendan: Now, when you talk about driving engagement, I mean, that’s another thing when people use social media. When companies use social media, a lot of it has become very much a branding thing. Some of them use it just purely as a RSS feed, pushing out stuff. There’s not a lot of engagement going on. It’s more like a numbers game. Let’s see how many followers we can get so we can show, hey, we’re really popular. But there’s not an actual engagement or connection going on there. What is some advice, I guess, you can provide as far as the best way businesses can really take advantage of those social media avenues to really get that big business values that they are looking for?

Tom: I would actually say it’s somewhere in the middle of what you were just talking about. Obviously, you need to do more than pump out an RSS feed, though probably not much more. You want engagement, but you don’t necessarily need a ton of it. My approach has always been I would rather have you engage with the brand through our sales force than have you engage with the brand on Facebook. Now, I come out of big service B2B. I’ve worked at professional services firms, and that’s what I’ve been marketing for my career. So we weren’t really pushing a transaction.

But if you saw something on one of my corporate blogs, I don’t want you to leave a comment. I want you to email us or call your existing account executive. I want you to engage with the company, rather than the platform for a couple of reasons. The first one is in sensitive, highly regulated, or highly competitive industries in the big B2B space, nobody wants to say something that will either expose them to liability or kind of tip their hand as to their strategic plan. So the odds of public engagement, meaningful public engagement, decline significantly.

Also, leaving a comment on a Facebook photo isn’t really going to bring you into my sales cycle. I mean, yeah, I can now see some public engagement, and I can reach out to you or have my sales team reach out to you. But I would much rather have that kind of affirmative inbound, “Hey, I saw this on your corporate blog. We need to talk.” Or, “I saw this on Facebook. It was an interesting chart. What does it mean to me?” Then use that dialogue, that traditional sales dialogue, stimulated by social media, to advance people in the sales cycle and turn the opportunities into revenue.

Brendan: You touched on something else that I wanted to ask you about as well. This idea of over engagement, the fear of maybe spilling the beans on something business related that you don’t want out there. A lot of companies have their main corporate accounts on Twitter, on Facebook, LinkedIn, their corporate blogs. Those things are very easy to govern. But you also have your employees out there using all these social media tools and building their own personal brands. If they do it well, what’s good for them is good for the company. But I think, for some organizations, there’s a fear, not just in social media, but content marketing in general of governing and keeping a handle on what people are saying. Like I said, again, if they’re doing it well, that’s great, but I think there’s also that attitude that there might be some risk there.

Tom: There is, but I think some of the risk is overblown. In the pre-social media days, there was always the concern that a company spokesman might say something that doesn’t reflect the brand positively or doesn’t advance the company against its public objectives. Back in the day, you had disgruntled employees could pick up the phone to a sympathetic and all-to-eager reporter who would then spread the message through the traditional media. I think social media is just a different manifestation of the same problem. More people do have direct access to the world, but they don’t necessarily have the same reach, and without a certain amount of prominence, the risk is somewhat contained.

But for major personal brands in the industry that are used to represent the company, basic media training principles could be applied to social media and should be, not to mention some good business discipline and a healthy dose of common sense. If you’re going to say something that you wouldn’t say publicly, if you wouldn’t tell a reporter, you shouldn’t tell anybody on social media. Respect the boundaries, your company’s strategy. Understand your company’s message and what your role is in communicating it. This isn’t social media specific stuff, but it applies in that environment as well. Social media really is the large online conversation. I know that comparison has been done to death, but it’s true. If you wouldn’t say something in a conversation in a public place, then you probably shouldn’t say it on Twitter either.

Brendan: Before we end. I want to make sure I do ask you about the new player in the social media arena. Google Plus is just everywhere right now. Everyone’s talking about it. Have you played around? Are you on Google Plus? What are your initial thoughts, I think, as far as from a business value? The engagement seems really high for the people that are on it, as far as I can tell. But I know it’s still very early. What do you think?

Tom: I am on it. I’ve been on it for a couple of weeks now, and personally it’s interesting. The level of engagement I do like. I think the feature set is interesting. It’s probably got to be matured a bit. The big issue I’ve been trying to kind of wrap my head around with Google Plus is basically how can I exploit it? Right now, it really is more a pure social environment it seems, and getting a corporate presence off the ground that way is very difficult, which, of course, helps protect the user experience and it helps people enjoy it without getting bombarded by all those pesky marketing messages that seem to find their way into social media platforms soon after they launch. That being said, I do think, given enough time, some practices will emerge. But it really does seem like it’s more a true word of mouth play than it is a broad platform play, right now at least.

Brendan: Yeah, sure. It fits in with the content marketing strategy that a lot of people discuss. That’s why I was interested to get your take, because from an ROI perspective, and I’ve seen some of the videos that you’ve done on OpenView Labs with us, as well, talking about really gathering actual data and really it only matters if you’re getting these conversions and if you’re getting these contacts directly. You read some other content marketing blogs, and they’re just saying, hey, you’re just targeting the audience and giving them information and educating them. I’ve actually said sometimes people are just, we hope that eventually they reward us by buying with us, and that’s the mean to an end. That’s very difficult to measure. So it’s interesting to kind of get your take where I feel like it actually is some actual numbers that you can provide to a CEO or a business leader and be like, here, look, this is what’s actually happening from this.

Tom: Yeah. I’ve got to tell you the notion of making a heavy investment of time or other resources, in the hope of a future transaction or a future lead development, it’s a hard one for me to swallow, and not just a hard one for me to take to the C suite, but a hard one for me to be interested in at all. As a marketing director, as every marketing director does, I’ve got objectives to hit, and my goal every day is to choose the right mix that will help me get there. A long-term play with no clear path to pay off, honestly it wouldn’t make it to the CEO. It wouldn’t make it across my desk even. I think it is easy to get a little complacent with social media, and think, okay, it’s free. It’s open. There’s good brand recognition. You can get in front of a lot of people. But the reality is it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of work. Any time you’re spending on an editorial calendar or some sort of content strategy development is time you could be investing in other marketing channels that would deliver ROI somewhat more predictably.

So I really think that social media, with the hope of ROI, is just a bad idea. How much better to treat it like any other marketing tool you have. Figure out what you want it to accomplish. Set objectives against it and develop a plan for accomplishing those objectives. I’ve been reading a lot more about the cost of social media marketing lately. It’s something I covered a while back. I remember my days as an in-house corporate blogger for a major financial company. I was the senior vice president in the group. It was a pretty substantial investment they made, and it was a full-time job to manage that blog, generate the intelligence we needed, cycle it back to our account teams. So when you look at consuming a full senior resource on content strategy, content creation, measurement, and communication, it’s got to have a really serious or really solid and meaningful payout. Otherwise, you really are just flushing money down the social pipes.

Brendan: Well, thanks very much. That’s great stuff Tom. We really appreciate it. Before we wrap up, I’d like to give you a chance to maybe direct people to your blog or explain how they can hear more from you.

Tom: I can be reached through The Cross Border Group. Either by InsideInvestorRelations.com, or CorporateSecretary.com.

Brendan: Excellent. Well, thanks very much, and we’ll talk to you again soon. Have a great one.

Tom: Thank you. You too. Take care.