Quite a bit of insights you got there.

However thinking out loud here, a point that perhaps can be included is defining the investments into social media with greater clarity. This will help you analyze the cliched ROI on SMM better. I have seen a lot of practitioners mention the returns aspect without speaking much about the investment part of it.

Let’s say a company invests its in social media to improve its recruitment efforts. On a general note the only two investments made are that of time and money (time garnering a higher share obviously). Now the success of a social media campaign can be gauged by measuring two metrics – one the time spent on social media and the second the time spent on interviews. (for simplicity I have kept money aside for now )

What the company needs to define is – I spend x amount of my Human resources’ time in recruitment efforts now. I will spend x amount of time of my human resources on social media. Has it reduced the time my resources spends in recruitment processes by this time next year. Resources spending less time recruiting and giving more time to core roles means better products/service which can then be co-related to sales as well in someway.

This of course is a rough idea and might even drastically change for a pure promotional objective (Christmas Sale for instance). However, having this wider benchmark of returns and metrics can perhaps give a better idea for firms looking at spending resources on social media.

The biggest point here is the time – marketers I think need a bigger time frame to see their efforts giving results. A blog post written today might be read by a customer 5 years from now and be influenced enough to buy a product, it can even be measured directly perhaps (tracking links) but who is going to wait 5 years. These are aspects that need better answers as well I guess.

I think I drifted a tad further from what your post was about though

Best,

Blake Cahill
SVP of Marekting
Visible Technologies