Adam,

Great points. Here’s a few more:

Social media is not right for your business if …
… all the marketing content you develop is just product pitches instead of useful customer-focused material.
… you have the illusion you are the one controlling your brand message in the marketplace.
… you believe social media is for you (hint: it’s for your customers).
… you think social media is free.
… you spend more time putting together legal policies than connecting to your customers.
… you do not integrate social media into your overall marketing plan.
… you have no marketing plan (for social media or otherwise).

Cheers,

-Alex

Paul,

Great point! The "Who" part is a very pragmatic issue that comes up in the execution of a social media strategy sooner or later.

Some of the cases we have run into:

1. The organization does not really have the culture to seriously engage in social media despite having put together a strategy.
2. The organization does not make it a priority to execute on their social media strategy (as opposed to their more "traditional" marketing plan activities like direct lead generation).
3. There is no clear plan or know-how within the organization on how to assign and manage social media resources.
4. There is no person with the right qualifications (knowledge, attitude, personality, willingness) within the organization to engage in social media.
5. The right person to engage does not have the time to do it on a regular basis.

All this means that sometimes the marketing agency has to also educate the clients on how to approach the issue of finding and managing the right personas for social media engagement. In our experience, bringing up this issue upfront and planning for it as part of the overall strategy with the client is a good way to make sure that the "Who" question will be addressed in the right way.

-Alex

Hi Matt,

Nice post with a great discussion angle as well. We all agree there is value in content, but putting a price tag on content that’s freely available online is a different matter, and, as Joe said, it depends on the objective at hand.

Here’s an approach we have used in a few cases when trying to evaluate the ROI of online content for increasing/accelerating sales. What we do is map the content assets to the different stages of the selling cycle and then try to approximate the bottom line impact of each content asset within its selling cycle stage for the company that’s trying to complete a sale.

A few examples:
1. An online demo can be assigned a value associated with a baseline cost of holding a sales meeting with a client.
2. An on-demand webinar can be assigned a value associated with a baseline cost of a completed inside sales call.
3. A twitter conversation or a forum topic discussion can be assigned a value associated with a baseline cost of a customer service call.
4. A technical whitepaper download can be assigned a value associated with a baseline cost of a training session.
5. A product brochure accessed via a search engine can be assigned a value associated with a baseline cost of capturing a lead.

Obviously the values are adjusted (usually downwards) depending on the actual impact that each content asset is found out to have (by looking, let’s say, at next stage conversion rates).

And this approach can build a good case for the ROI of content marketing overall, which, IMHO, is a good thing!

Ken, you started a terrific discussion here that is all so timely with the growing urgency of social media monitoring for any type of online marketing nowadays. In our agency’s experience with these tools (esp. Radian6 vis-a-vis Alterian/Techrigy SM2), we have come across both quantitative and qualitative differences, especially as these tools attempt to gauge more advanced metrics like conversation sentiments, engagement levels, influencer ratings, and so on.

Frankly, I doubt you will be able to get a bottom line answer as to what these differences are attributed to. As noted by a number of participants in this discussion, the same issue applies to web analytics tools and search engines. So, what we usually do is rely on not just one, but a number of (paid and free) tools for social media monitoring and each time we go over the results we are getting with respect to the specific goal at hand. The social media monitoring tools are of great help (and will be of even more help as these technologies mature), but their use still requires significant oversight to ensure useful analysis and effective action taking.