Social Media Strategies

I find it amusing whenever I come across big healthy organizations stingy when it comes to investing money in social media marketing through online social interaction. I guess, they fail to see it as an investment rather than a cost for their event branding strategies.

(On branding: a smart marketer once told me that branding is just a word used by advertising agencies to justify a budget. That great products brand themselves & thats all there is to it. Thats another post though).

I came across one such company recently that has outsourced a project to a team for developing, conceptualizing and writing a corporate blog for their upcoming annual expo event. Their blog was conceptualized in a manner to invite thought leaders and industry experts to participate in it as a rich community. I visited their site and was happy to see lots of activities, regular postings, participatory comments, etc.

These people informally told me their concerns about the fact that they have no real way to measure the impact on event branding quantitatively for this project. I was both shocked and amused to hear them say this. Shocked because somehow it seemed like they didn’t care about the community that was being formed around the blog - or the enthusiasts that were being born. Amused because, I knew that they don’t know any better. Social media marketing is far different from traditional media, my friends. I think I’ll also write a post on how adapting social media requires a complete mindset shift, to stop myself from going out on a tangent here.

If you find yourself in a similar situation where you want to measure the impact of all of the tools that you are using then here is some honest advice.

Measuring the benefit to your brand via social interactions, communities and social networking is difficult to put down on numbers. However, it can be calculated based on a combination of both qualitative and quantitative measures such as: increase in your list numbers, increase in your ticket demands, increase in audience traffic, participation levels in your blog posts, increase in sharing and bookmarking of your sites, development of evangalists, increase in page rankings, increase in exposure to industry bloggers, increase in authority of the blog rankings, decrease in your involvement to keep your blogs afloat. These are all rich online social interactions. Some of these directly effect your bottom line figures, where as others are going to be more subtle and may go unnoticed.

Please don’t start counting the number of times your event brand name has been written or talked about as a measure for the success of such social media marketing projects. Be realistic in how you factor in different elements of event branding when deciding whether or not your money is being well spent.

Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)

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