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>>>>As I documented in the book, social media is a total loss leader for large corporations, too. They’re more or less there out of obligation I can back this

>>>>As I documented in the book, social media is a total loss leader for large corporations, too. They’re more or less there out of obligation I can back this up with some information. I currently work for a large corporation who has invested a ton of money into social media (facebook, twitter, instagram). Even after several years, there is a huge war being fought between "new media" types in our company and the "old media" types. Our CTO routinely joins our meetings and basically says, "Great, we had 5,000 likes on our Facbeook page, how many more widgets does that sell?" For them, there is almost no way to track how much of an impact a tweet or a facebook like has on their bottom line. Conversely, when they run a print ad for a certain model, and sales increase x%, they attribute it to the print ad.

DanBC 14y ago
You could probably make a company distinctive by not appearing on any social media platforms. Not having to kludge all those little [f] and [t] share icons onto every ad would probably make the creatives happy.
NoPiece 14y ago
I think if you were selling widgets online (I assume you aren't), then the story would be much different. You can't know what behavior your customer took after seeing a print ad, but I know exactly how much traffic I get from our Facebook page, and how much of that converts for us. Unfortunately since FB has started charging to promote posts, we get almost nothing from them, even though our likes grow, so we are all but abandoning FB. But that is a problem with Facebook's model, not social media inherently.
- tarr11 14y ago
  Why is this a problem with Facebook's model? It just sounds like you were priced out of Facebook network.
  - NoPiece 14y ago
    I'm not anti-Facebook. It's a better, more accountable, place to spend money than in a print ad. But, there was a bait and switch where they encouraged businesses to pay to connect to users, then they devalued all those connections by requiring payment for each communication. The negative for them is that they are becoming more dependent on a smaller number of large businesses. It may work for them, but it is riskier to have a less diversified pool of customers.
damoncali 14y ago
Our CTO routinely joins our meetings and basically says, "Great, we had 5,000 likes on our Facbeook page, how many more widgets does that sell?" That is incredibly sophisticated thinking for a large co. In my experience, it goes more like this. 1. PR guys pay a blogger with no traffic to write a post. 2. Blogger writes article and gets paid handsomely (The PR guys don't know he has no traffic since they didn't want to offend him by asking). 3. PR guys flog interns to generate chatter via social media. 4. Interns tweet amongst themselves. 5. PR guys get some mathematically incorrect and dubious metrics for some ill defined thing like "social media reach" and declare that said blog post generated 190 million impressions, which is equivalent to (just because) $5 million dollars of media. 6. PR guys claim victory and celebrate. Their superiors wonder what the hell the PR guys actually do for a living and get back to their infighting over budgets and why the sales guys aren't getting more product out. Total cost to big co? Hard to tell, but I'd guess somewhere around $20k when you add up all the salaries involved and the huge fees the agencies charge. But the bottom line is that even the most wasteful social media is peanuts at BigCo. It simply does not matter. [Note: this is not a made up story. The numbers are slightly off because I can't remember them, but that's about it]
cgio 14y ago
I don't know why, but the CTO's question sounds so wrong. And my view is that you cannot get the right answers if you do not know what to ask and, especially in this case, what to measure. Intuitively, reading this question I felt like I would answer "Great, we have circulated 5000 memos, how many more widgets does that sell?" It is wrong in so many ways. Not all memos/likes are created equal (unless you make them so by ignoring them.) Not every activity is a sales/front-line activity. I do performance management for a living, and people routinely get the performance measurement part wrong in so many ways. But especially for social media I think we are still at the lowest level of performance understanding and concepts' articulation.

DanBC 14y ago

You could probably make a company distinctive by not appearing on any social media platforms. Not having to kludge all those little [f] and [t] share icons onto every ad would probably make the creatives happy.

NoPiece 14y ago

I think if you were selling widgets online (I assume you aren't), then the story would be much different. You can't know what behavior your customer took after seeing a print ad, but I know exactly how much traffic I get from our Facebook page, and how much of that converts for us. Unfortunately since FB has started charging to promote posts, we get almost nothing from them, even though our likes grow, so we are all but abandoning FB. But that is a problem with Facebook's model, not social media inherently.

tarr11 14y ago
Why is this a problem with Facebook's model? It just sounds like you were priced out of Facebook network.
- NoPiece 14y ago
  I'm not anti-Facebook. It's a better, more accountable, place to spend money than in a print ad. But, there was a bait and switch where they encouraged businesses to pay to connect to users, then they devalued all those connections by requiring payment for each communication. The negative for them is that they are becoming more dependent on a smaller number of large businesses. It may work for them, but it is riskier to have a less diversified pool of customers.

damoncali 14y ago

Our CTO routinely joins our meetings and basically says, "Great, we had 5,000 likes on our Facbeook page, how many more widgets does that sell?" That is incredibly sophisticated thinking for a large co. In my experience, it goes more like this. 1. PR guys pay a blogger with no traffic to write a post. 2. Blogger writes article and gets paid handsomely (The PR guys don't know he has no traffic since they didn't want to offend him by asking). 3. PR guys flog interns to generate chatter via social media. 4. Interns tweet amongst themselves. 5. PR guys get some mathematically incorrect and dubious metrics for some ill defined thing like "social media reach" and declare that said blog post generated 190 million impressions, which is equivalent to (just because) $5 million dollars of media. 6. PR guys claim victory and celebrate. Their superiors wonder what the hell the PR guys actually do for a living and get back to their infighting over budgets and why the sales guys aren't getting more product out. Total cost to big co? Hard to tell, but I'd guess somewhere around $20k when you add up all the salaries involved and the huge fees the agencies charge. But the bottom line is that even the most wasteful social media is peanuts at BigCo. It simply does not matter. [Note: this is not a made up story. The numbers are slightly off because I can't remember them, but that's about it]

cgio 14y ago

I don't know why, but the CTO's question sounds so wrong. And my view is that you cannot get the right answers if you do not know what to ask and, especially in this case, what to measure. Intuitively, reading this question I felt like I would answer "Great, we have circulated 5000 memos, how many more widgets does that sell?" It is wrong in so many ways. Not all memos/likes are created equal (unless you make them so by ignoring them.) Not every activity is a sales/front-line activity. I do performance management for a living, and people routinely get the performance measurement part wrong in so many ways. But especially for social media I think we are still at the lowest level of performance understanding and concepts' articulation.