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Great call to arms Todd. Showing the depth and breadth of what you "could" do with a chunky social media budget is certainly a good way to convince those who might still perceive it as a bit niche. I'd be curious to know your thoughts on whether (all things being equal)those brands that "dip their toes in" are less likely to be happy with results than those who invest a serious amount. It's my take that just dabbling in social media is likely to be more of a disappointment to some clients who've heard the buzz and almost expect more from less.

Hi Todd,

This was a great question and one that I often ask clients as well. To me, the thing that "keeps you up at night" is the one thing to focus on, because it is most important and most pressing. To me, that's the issue of scalability. Can engaging bloggers scale from reaching out to 25 bloggers to reaching out to hundreds? Can conversations employees are having with customers scale to be more than just the few star employees doing it? These are the questions that customers who "get it" are asking, and the ones that we will need to be able to answer. I'm not worried about getting the million dollars, I'm focused on how I can prove those million dollars were so well spent that I'll continue to get those kinds of budgets and be able to prove the value. That's what keeps me up at night. Well, that and my six month old ...

Hey hey - Saw this on AdRants...

Definitely a nice campaign, and I'm sure it would work, but you seem to be making the classic mistaken conflation of metrics with ROI. What, in this campaign, will actually measure ROI? Impact? Financial return? Who do I know I'll have gotten my money's worth?

Todd,
Mr. Bhargava’s answer brings up an ongoing issue - many companies/marketing professionals are still struggling to measure ROI when it comes to SM campaigns. What you said is true – companies need to benchmark before and measure after. The word of mouth and attitudes, however, might be hard to measure. And sales… well it can take a while for a SM campaign to impact those.

Great discussion. Tatiana, actually in my experience you can actually see an impact on sales more immediately vs. traditional. You can track it between links to a call to action on a website, for example, as well as actively listening to the buzz/feedback/discussions using real-time social media monitoring and appropriately reaching out (finding the "point of need".) Granted it can be different for each campaign as to its original purpose.

Todd, excellent post and one I've been looking forward to for a while now. I knew after taking a bit of a break from blogging you'd be back with a vengeance. I think I may have actually been drooling while reading all of your ideas for a $1 million social media campaign! But the real beauty of social media is that it doesn't cost $1 million. You can do an incredible campaign for a heck of a lot less than that.

Still drooling, though, thinking about it...

Todd,

I think you're missing the mark a bit on this one ... I'm more inclined to agree with Rohit and Tatiana. This isn't about how much you can do with $1 million dollars, it's about how you can monitor it, measure it, translate it ... then replicate it ... this is all while the ad and marketing teams just tripled your 'impression' or ROI or CPM number with half the cash.

I'm on our side regarding the value of 'our' impressions and CPM. Personally, I'd rather have $1 million dollars put towards a marketing campaign aimed at convincing 'our clients' to take more money from their counterparts in advertising and marketing and put it towards conversing with their constituents, not shouting at them.

DW

Wow! There are a ton of great ideas in this post.

Todd and Rohit:

If you are moving the needle on brand advocacy - increased sales will result. We (MotiveQuest) have tested this - including rigorous statistical validation - on about 18 months of data.

Brand advocacy is observable AND measurable online. I have a post about it here:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/3msnso

Happy to provide more details.

Also, about communities - people are talking to each other in MASSIVE VOLUME and it isn't up to you (brand owner) to "get them talking". I think this is the single biggest misconception about social media marketing.

And we can measure this for a fraction of your $1.0 MM budget.

TO'B

hola! Todd

Great post! I think the real question is, how are we truly measuring ROI. I absolutely believe that the SM approach will yield a much greater (if done right of course) ROI over a longer period of time.

That being said, come on Todd, don't you have some graphs to show us some comparisons of Traditional vs SM over a specific period of time ? Of course, we can talk to clients about "inbound calls, media buzz, customer satisfaction index" all day long but, at the end of the day the CEO will want us to "reasonably" articulate how & what his tangible ROI will be.

I look forward to your next post. I am ready to come and work on the $1,000,000 campaign with you ;) just give me a *flip* and I am in.

Excellent post. And your hypothetical client most likely would be well served by every nugget of advice you offer.

The frustrated energy of your post is all too familiar, because I know (as you do) that the client who comes to the world of relationship building by peeling a small bit from a bloated old-media budget has unrealistic expectations.

They still will measure your results by old-media standards, which means weekly, monthly and quarterly demand.

I AM NOT disagreeing with anything in your post. Too often, though, the person holding the purse strings wants to see numbers NOW.

NOW is all about numbers.

Brands are about relationships

Numbers are so 1995.

;]

i'd open it up and include more off-line events...though i'd design them to be documented. one of the ideas that has stuck in my head the last few years came from a conversation i had with doug atkin about culting of brands: "members" of cult brands have lots of face to face interaction. and we all know most wom happens off-line right?

and i'm glad to see your video production group idea!

also on the social media newsroom tip: watch http://www.sonecast.net/ they're going live in a few months with something you'll like. no, i'm not affiliated but i've been talking to them.

Thanks, all, for the terrific and thoughtful comments.

Seems like ROI is the big issue. I am curious: how much of the responsibility do you put on the CORPORATION to figure this part out?

What a great conversation this is! I think many of the commenters are missing your point, which was brilliant. The ROI measure will come from pre/post metrics of sales/market share or any other $$-based metric you want.

You do an analysis of variance (ANOVA) calculation against the $ impact of a traditional campaign conducted the year before. Marketers do it all the time. Its just that PR people run screaming from the room when you start talking statistical analysis.

However, I think what also will convince the CEO is demonstrated improvement in relationship scores on factors like credibility, trust, satisfaction, commitment, and control mutuality. Improvement in relationship scores leads to lower transaction costs, improved efficiencies, lower turnover and higher net return to shareholders.

You can take that to the bank.

Hi Todd

Thanks for the interesting read. You want to know about how much the responsibility should be on the corporation to determine ROI?

Coming from the client side, the "corporation" bears the responsibility of having their analytics established correctly from the starting point to accurately measure the results.

However, you as the agency running this campaign, are ultimately on the hook because I, as the client, am on the hook to my superiors. It is my job to convince the higher-ups that using traditional ROI needs to be a part and not just the entire measure of success for a campaign of this nature. And it is your job to give me the information so I can make that argument.

However, even if that argument is made successfully, shrewd businesses need to invest their money wisely in marketing campaigns to create not only buzz and conversations, but buzz that leads to sales.

For a business whose success depends on not only positive buzz but increased sales (whether ad or product) and quarterly and yearly numbers (that's what investors, VCs, and potential buyers look at, not buzz index) - the first programs to get cut are going to be the ones that don't perform to the traditional metrics.

You can have 1000 people follwing your Twitter, and 2000 images in your Flickr group, and 200,000 people who have installed your Facebook application - but if there is no bump in sales, your contract is not going to be renewed.

Unless sales isn't the goal of your client. And there are not many of those out there that survive very long.

Good post with lots of good information. I'm curious though - what is the type of product you're talking about - is this B2C or B2B? I ask because I think the use of these tools differs by audience. What tools work for a smaller vendor in the B2B space? We've explored many of these but struggle to find the fit with an executive-level decision maker in a B2B environment. Appreciate your thoughts.

Todd:

If you would like to see what an extensive social media campaign looks like in practice, you should view some of the work that H&R Block has done in the space.

The campaign is far-reaching with use of communities such as YouTube, SecondLife, Twitter, Facebook, our own branded community. The goal has been to engage consumers and move brand metrics. The pre and post measurement has been part of the rigor around these programs. Below are two links that highlight the program and can be an example that any brand can utilize social media (hey if we can make taxes engaging....)

redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2008/04/sap-global-surv.html

http://adage.com/article?article_id=127134

cheers

Of course, you could just call FM.

Hi Todd,

First time stopping-by your blog - great post!

As a vendor in the brand and online reputation monitoring (ORM) space, we understand some of the challenges touched on throughout this post. ROI is a central and recurring theme with communication firms/agencies, but validation of Social Media (SM) campaigns can mean different things to different companies.

I may not be helping with the ROI conundrum by using anecdotes, but IMO the enterprise landscape may find itself stuck if it is looking for traditional ways of quantifying value creation through SM.

IMO value creation is best achieved through SM when the brand and reputation lifecycle is found to be constantly evolving in an organic manner. SM is capable of disrupting the very cultures created by traditional corporations, and as such, tracking online conversation finds itself as a welcome addition to any "idea" list.

The possibility of falling out of favour with Web audiences ought to be far more compelling than any excercise to arrive at a "universal" ROI.

With regard to your question on measurement, the eco-graph
has quickly become an important metric within our platform of Reputation Measurement™ products and services. This essentially means providing business with the tools to quickly determine eco-topics which can make or break brands. An example to nicely tie-in my thoughts can be found with any discussion centered around what Web audiences perceive as "greenwash."

Joseph

Todd,
Does this mean that there’s a new role emerging in the PR industry? To keep track of all your media contacts on social media and networking sites is a lot of work. Somebody needs to do it.