Category: Social Media ROI

From CRM to Socail: The future of advertising

From CRM to Social: The Future of Measuring Customer Value

A few years ago my friend and colleague Maria Sipka introduced me to a couple of professors at Wharton working on a collaborative project about the future of advertising. They invited me to submit an essay on CRM to social, one of what grew to more than 200 essays from colleagues eventually published in the online Advertising 2020 project. They promoted dialog, researched and analyzed the topics of discussion and ultimately wrote a book on their findings, recently published by Wiley.

I got a chance to see a manuscript of the book when it was being written, so I was excited to see they used a quote from my essay—one that I thought was provocative. It was a quote about the degree to which, I believe, advertising has missed the point of social media by focusing on metrics that emphasize quantity more than quality. It’s the kind of criticism that doesn’t always win friends among colleagues, so when I finally got a copy of the published book, I was surprised to find they’d doubled down and selected a second quote, one for the opening page of the book.

Four Keys to Avoid Massive Project Failure

If you’ve ever managed a big project you know many little things can go wrong on the way to that moment of truth when you hope, ultimately, everything goes right. If you’ve managed a lot of big projects, you know how painful it can be when that ultimate moment of truth blows up in your face.? In business, big projects are a part of daily life. We make products, we launch campaigns, we engineer production processes. Big money is at stake, as well as careers and companies. So how do you avoid falling flat on your face?

How Do You Drive Channel Partner Success?

Chris Becwar at Channel Management published a post last week that points to? one of the central challenges channel partner marketers face today, a challenge we discuss frequently at SocialRep: how do you enable channel partners to market most effectively?

It’s a seemingly simple question with a time-honored answer: sales incentives! If you provide the right incentives, channel partners will? move heaven and earth to close deals. What’s missing from that simple equation is the depth of disruption rocking the global IT channel, reducing the effectiveness of? traditional incentive approaches.

How Do You Measure Partner Performance?

Visibility into partner performance means seeing how partners are marketing, what kinds of reaction they’re getting, what kind of market influence they can generate, and what quality of leads they can produce.

What’s the ROI on Social Media ROI?

The most fundamental truth of ROI: It’s nearly impossible to measure for marketing, it’s the wrong place to start with social media, and it’s a virtual recipe for social marketing disaster.

Five Reasons Social Media ROI Will Never Die

I’m a big fan of Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk). He’s one of the best voices behind ReadWriteWeb, and one of the few people that delivers consistently good reporting and analysis on social media technology. But Marshall’s recent piece on the supposed death of Social Media ROI really deserves a crushing response. … Read more

In Social Media, Engagement Matters More than Volume

As social media goes mainstream for corporate marketing, far too many marketers are getting caught up in activity metrics rather than value. Klout. Likes. Follows. Retweets. Everything is about volume of engagement, with little if any focus on the value of engagement. Recently I heard a senior executive at a … Read more

The Four Percent Solution for Agile Social Marketing

With technology selection, just adopt this simple truth: You are going to fail. So get it over with as quickly and cheaply as you can. The more time you spend planning some monumental RFP for an overarching social marketing platform, the more costly and crushing your failure will be.

Mapping the Frontier of Marketing Finance

The simple and unfortunate reality is that the marketing profession is not sufficiently prepared to reliably generate the markets businesses need to drive sustainable profits into the future.

Salesforce and Radian6: What does it all mean?

Focusing relentlessly on growth produces great results for investors, but it doesn’t produce a great product when the market and technology landscape is evolving so rapidly.