So on Thursday I took in the AMA special Interest group “Social Media ROI, yes it’s possible” (#SMROI for the hashtaggers). The event was held at the Spoke Club on King West, and was billed as the event to teach all us social media evangelists how to sell it to our superiors through proving the ROI. Here’s the full description form the AMA Event page:
You are a social media evangelist, interested in leading your company into a new age of marketing. Your boss is willing to go along; provided you can tell him the payback on your investment. Measuring ROI on social media is one of the most challenging issues facing marketers today. Come listen to three industry leaders give their perspective on how social media can and should be measured. You’ll come away from this session armed with how social media can be used to drive your organizations bottom line.
Wow, three industry experts are going to share with 70+ social media evangelist their methodologies on measuring ROI. This sounds great. I started to think to wonder which metrics they track, and tools they use. Do their clients allow them access to business data to actually measure the impact on business results? Or is this going to be another lunchbag letdown?
Well what we got from this event was more fluff and more stats about how big social media is. WOW! If this room is supposed to be filled with evangelists they were preaching to the choir. We all should know by now that social media is huge, that it’s not a fad, and it’s very much gone mobile. ok, got it, good. Now tell us through actual actionable items how we can successfully measure ROI and measure against business results.
No slight against the speakers they all presented their content well and their was a lot of useful information but it was very high level. I also understand they were all given 15 – 20 minutes so how deep can you really get. So really my beef is not at all with the speakers but more with the event itself. Maybe the AMA just billed this wrong or I misunderstood it. I actually thought maybe I missed something and was way off. So I went back a searched through the #SMROI tagged tweets and grabbed the presentations available to see if I truly missed something. Based on my self doubt fueled research I am no longer in doubt.
Steve Irvine form 80/20 Solutions did the best job at directing us even remotely close to understanding any form of measuring ROI. His individual approach is interesting and the Tupperware analogy was great, If your orginiazation employs any type of call center some ideas in his presentation may spark your interest. you can grab his presentation here.
Check out the tweet stream: #SMROI
Another attendees take on the event: SMOJoe.com
I’m sure these events will only get better. Just a little disappointed I guess.
-Adam
Posted via web from mr.brain
