What's Missing in the Social Media ROI Debate: Accountability

Welcome to maximize your social actionable advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social, social media author, speaker, consultant, and founder of maximize social business, Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, greetings to wherever we are in the world. This is Neal Schaffer with another episode of maximize your social, you probably hear my voice and it doesn't sound like it usually does. I have this really, really bad cough that I caught over at New Media Expo in Las Vegas, it turns out, I guess a number of people here in Irvine, California have and if you've suffered from a cough centric cold, I've been told that this cough remains for about three weeks. And I'm only one week into it. But I'm feeling outside of the car feeling great. I'm preparing for a event I am speaking out tomorrow on LinkedIn and social selling for small business owners really excited about that. But the topic I wanted to talk to you about today is one thing that I really see missing about the conversation or debate about the ROI of social media. Now, in maximize your social, I tackle this subject. And obviously, assuming you create a social media strategy that's objective based, it becomes easy to calculate your ROI based on metrics that show whether or not you reach those objectives. And I've talked about also the ROI social media doesn't exist, because it's really a business ROI in that social media is only helping you know, how much did your investment in social media help you reach the different varied business objectives you may have. But I think the thing that's missing, and I talked about this in Maximizer, social how social media is a never ending, changing landscape. And therefore there's a need to be nimble to be measuring to experiment to try new things. And on the other hand, social media is mainstream, every large companies doing it, and it's starting to eat up a lot more of the marketing budget. In fact, it's been said that it by I think 2014 2015, on average, the social media spend as a portion of the entire marketing budget may be somewhere about 20%. Now, depending on the company size, that's a lot of money, that's hundreds of 1000s Millions, 10s of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars. And you get to the point, okay? And if you've worked at a startup like I did, or any other company, really, there's a notion of accountability and everything you do. And I think this is the missing piece in the social media ROI debate, that you are accountable for what you invest in, the company is accountable, whoever approves, especially when companies say, well, we want to own social media, okay? Will you own the budget, and therefore you own the accountability of that program. And at the beginning that I'm sure back in the early 90s. And we were just starting out with websites, people were investing whatever, just because they figured they needed to have a website for those companies that did early on. But now as social media is mainstream, and matures, we get to the points and you know, do we really need to be investing that much in social, and especially when you you know, General Motors a long time ago said, Hey, we're gonna stop doing Facebook ads, we don't see the ROI, I tend to think that, you know, paid social was very underutilized. But you know, the recent announcement of Facebook and you know, the changes to edge rank, or what used to be called Edge rank, and the fact that if you've seen the reach of your Facebook posts, it's not getting nearly what it used to. And in fact, it's not Facebook's fault. It's just the fact that we're all publishing more content. And there's more business users, and people that are using social media, there's only so much you can fit in the newsfeed right. And you know, it's going to be a challenge for any social network, there's just a lot of noise out there. And if you want to rise above the noise, it's commonly or I would say, it is going to be more and more so that it is going to be a pay to play scenario for what it's worth. Now, getting back to the accountability, are you employing best practices and really optimizing your program? Are you still in 2011 Social media, where you're spending a lot of money just on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, where you've ignored Instagram, Pinterest and Google Plus, have you even verified your website for Google? Plus? Did you do the markup for Google Authorship for your authors on your blog with Google Plus? I think that there is a lot you can be doing with social media, and obviously, my whole brand and this podcast is about maximize your social, but the accountability of that budget, are you really employing best practices, and doing everything you can to maximize the ROI of that budget that the accountability? Are you basically throwing money at an agency without understanding what the ROI of that spends been? And based on their reports, which are just various metrics that may not have any real meaning as to whether or not you achieved your business objectives, trying to get right off internally. You know, the other thing that's happening here is with the evolution of social business, we're all starting to work together and And the more you know, social media becomes an important part of your business as it begins to be used enterprise wide, there's obviously going to be more oversight into well, what are we spending? Whether it's a CEO, a CFO? or what have you? Are you being accountable for what you're spending if you haven't been accountable? If you've gotten the green light to do whatever you want, hey, that's great. But I do believe there's going to be a time when the accountability question will be called in when sales start to fall, when profits start to fall, we need to cut budget, where are we going to cut it? We hired five people for social media program, do we really need them? Do we need a dedicated social media manager or community manager? I'm just throwing these things out for two reasons. Number one, like I said, I do think it's going to be a future conversation that we're gonna hear more about in businesses if you haven't heard it already. And the second reason I say that is because without that social media strategy, or you know, let's call it a social business strategy, where I Deeley, you have influential stakeholders internally that have written off on where you are measuring what you're doing. And your social media activities are aligned with your business objectives. Without doing that, you know, you really run the risk of potentially not only losing your budget, but losing your job. So this is as much a message for business owners and executives as it is, for those that are involved in social media programs themselves. It's really an open ended question. Like I said, I'm very passionate. If you haven't read, maximize your social in that book really is all about really creating that social media strategy and and measuring the ROI so that you know that you are 100% accountable. For every dollar that you spend in your social media program. That's really the premise that I had in writing that book, employing best practices, and all the other things I talked about, if you don't have that, well, there may be a day of reckoning. And if you are an executive or a business owner listening to this, you really should ask those people that are in charge of your social media program, how they justify the spend. And in fact, it may be interesting to open that conversation up to a lot of your internal spend. And you know, not just in social media, but in other areas. Because I've met with business owners, who didn't really track the ROI of their non social media marketing efforts, and wanted to track the ROI of their social media for us. I said, Hey, how do you track the ROI of your print ads? What have you I didn't really have an answer for that. So it brings up a lot of interesting questions. Obviously, there's another frame of thought that says, hey, we need to keep spending 10% on marketing, or we need to keep spending 20% on r&d, and we're going to allocate 5% of social that's great. But even within that, whatever allocation you have all you really maximizing your efforts, and that's really where I think a robust social media strategy creation, maintenance and optimization comes into play. I'll stop there really open ended question hope that gave you some advice on how to think about these things. I welcome your comments about what I'm talking about, as well as any other topics you want covered, or anyone you'd like to interview in the program. I'm going to sign out for now. I hope next time I talk to you that I'm over this really, really nasty cough and I obviously hope that none of you ever get this. But until then, make it a great day and wishing you all the best of luck and maximizing your social wherever you are in the world. Bye bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on the show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neil at maximize your social.com Thanks for listening and have a great day.