3 Ways to Improve Your Company's Social Media Architecture. Joshua-Michéle Ross (@jmichele) is SVP and director of digital strategy, Europe with Fleishman Hillard and an O’Reilly Radar blogger.
His free ebook on social media architecture is available here. While the pressures on large organizations to use social media have gone up, creating a social media presence has reached one-click simplicity. The result is a sprawling mess. Take one look at the social media footprint of any large brand and you find dozens of social sites that lie abandoned with no active engagement. Many are redundant, fracturing the same potential audience into separate, so-called “communities.” This is unsustainable and counterproductive. The solution is a “social media architecture” — a structure that brings harmony, utility and durability to the diverse elements of an organization’s social media presence. 1. A proper footprint uses a few data points (site name, platform, size, recency of moderator activity) to visualize your social media presence. Click to enlarge 2. Least Asked Social Media Q…Why? Asking "why" in all aspects of business and life in general is unexploited.
Day in and day out I help businesses understand the opportunity that lies within new media, not because of Twitter or Facebook. I do so because opportunity is pervasive in the hearts and minds of consumers everywhere. We just have yet to really understand for what reason. Report after report, post after post, conference after conference, I am inundated with examples of social media success.
Except success is difficult to assess, unless we look at the numbers, sentiment, clickthroughs, and outcomes. In 1964 Marshall McLuhan proposed in his book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, that the "medium is the message. " What does your profile or presence say about you? The Anti-Social Business I'm often asked to research systems and processes to make social media participation cost efficient and scalable.
I want to come back for a moment to the question of why. Why are businesses engaging in social media? 1. 2. Develop a social media strategy. Calculate Social Media ROI. Social media return on investment (ROI) is simply a measurement of efficiency.
It’s a lot of things to a lot of people: “return on inactivity,” “return on innovation” and “return on engagement.” However, in a stricter sense, social media ROI is defined as a measure of the efficiency of a social media marketing campaign. This definition might sound complicated, but in reality, it’s quite simple. What Does ROI Really Mean? Let’s backtrack a bit. We’ve all heard what “ROI” stands for, but what’s less understood is the actual meaning and the importance of ROI. In the financial world, ROI is used to measure the financial efficiency of an investment. ROI = (return – investment) / investment %. Increase social media ROI. This means that if you increase your return while keeping your investment the same, then you increase your ROI. Because the ROI formula uses only two inputs – the return and the investment – the ROI formula is an easy way to measure and compare marketing campaigns.
Simple, right?