LibraryTechtonics

This morning’s Social Media Breakfast Boston (SMB10) focused on the topic of measuring ROI.  As someone who is predominantly a consumer in this context, it was an interesting peek at what seemed like advertising/PR inside baseball.  There was a live stream of the talks, and the recording will be posted on Hubspot’s blog, the very gracious sponsors of this morning’s breakfast.  You can also check out everyone’s tweets from this morning.

I won’t rehash the event too much, since the video will give you most of the information you need, and the presentations are brief and worth the time.  Suffice it to say that at least 2 of the presenters, Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan and Visible Measures VP of Marketing and Analytics Matt Cutler, focused on the numbers.  Not that this is bad, it’s actually really interesting to get a glimpse of how the numbers come to be, and how they are used.

Overall, the gist was that old advertising doesn’t work anymore, and people find what they need through searches and social networks as opposed to clicking on blunt force ads.  So, by using resources (money, people, time) to create a presence in social communities instead of buying Google AdWords and pursuing traditional advertising methods, you increase your visibitlity, and therefore your ability to reap monitary rewards.  However, the trick is knowing where on the Roulette board to put your chips, and how many, based on who lives and plays in each space, and what types of content they find valuable, and without ROI assessment, it’s a tough bet to make.

Both Hubspot and Visible Measures seem to be getting the numbers right.  They’ve found ways to generate followers in various social networks online, they see the eyeball potential of all those followers, and they’ve even been able to turn some of those eyeballs into actual customers.  These are PR/analytics firms, whose customers are other businesses… more on that in a minute.

Brian Halligan mentioned during the Q&A that, while many of the people in the room might not want to hear this, the future of good “advertising” is really in hiring content creators instead of PR people, to create content to drive traffic to businesses and brands.  Cool commercials, online only content, music videos, free articles, games, toys, all sorts of stuff, because users finding your content is the new way to attract attention, not by in-your-face methods like ads.  Be findable, and be cool.

So back to the people in the room being mostly PR people… I had an interesting conversation with Chuck Tanowitz before the presentations began about how he believed that the future of PR is possibly for companies to bring in journalists as an impartial third party to create content about the companies, just to get the word out about what they’re doing and why people should care in the content realms that people live in.  After the presentations, this fed into part two of our interestin conversation on how some marketing people (especially on higher levels) don’t understand how the new web is really about user-generated content on the user’s level (not necessarily shiny, polished, or high-quality), and how that supports the craving for real transparency (because people aren’t stupid, and they can tell that something too shiny, polished, and high-quality is really just choreographed and not entirely transparent advertising).

Given that much of marketing/PR/analytics see potential in the numbers of followers they garner in any given social tech outlet, and that, on a business-to-business level, they are seeing some measurable ROI by how many new customers they bring in, but can only have faith in the rest of the subjective and human element of social networking ROI that can’t be measured — being a fan may not lead to them making money right now — I have questions from a consumer perspective for you.  Those who are in the business, take off your business hats if you can before your read and respond.

• Do you follow companys on Twitter, join groups/become fans of companies on Facebook, subscribe to RSS feeds, sign up for email newsletters, join groups on LinkedIn, etc., based on the brand of the company alone, or does it have something to do with the people and personalities who represent these companies?  Are you drawn to the people, who lead you to the companies, or does it matter?
• Following companies on Twitter:  do you do it?  Why, or why not?  What kinds of content draws you to them, or pushes you away from them?  Is an all link feed just spam to you, or is it better than RSS?  Do you prefer people from companies who interact as humans first, employees second?
• Are you loyal to personalities, or to companies?  Say you love yarn, and you buy yarn from a company because you like dealing with a specific person… then that person goes to work for another yarn company.  Are you loyal to the yarn company because it’s great, or to the person because they’re great?

I do agree that good content is the best way to attract attention.  I’m just trying to suss out whether the numbers would work out the same way for business-to-consumer interaction.  Let me know what you think of my braindump on this… I look forward to your answers to the questions.

Tags: roi, smb10, social media, Social Media Breakfast, social networking