You Can Leave Your Twitter-Mail After the ‘Beep’
“Have you ever asked what the ROI is on the desk phones that you provide for your employees? What about your cell phone? Ever wondered what the ROI is on that?” 
Sean O’Driscoll of Ant’s Eye View poised these blunt questions at this year’s Social Media Breakfast Seattle to expose the folly of focusing on a strict return on investment (ROI) for social media. Alyssa Magnotti, the Community Manager of ThinkSpace, discusses these points in her post, Worrying About the ROI of Social Media? Don’t!
Sean’s guess (and mine as well) is that you haven’t ever asked those questions, because you realize that you need phones to communicate with your customers; it’s the exact same way with Social Media! Your clients are out there trying to communicate with you, so you need to set up your profiles on those sites so that you are able to communicate back. Right now they are there and possibly ready to buy from you, but if you are’t there to answer their questions or foster relationships with them, expect them to go to your competitor. If they can’t find your phone number (i.e. your twitter account), they aren’t going to call you.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably a professional who cares about social media to better build your business, or you are looking to engage with Qworky and find out what we’re all about (hopefully both). Either way its important to articulate that, to us, social media is all about communication—the most innovative form in human history to be exact!
Just as plugging your ears to ignore your what your customers are saying won’t stop them from speaking, a pure focus on monetizing their thoughts won’t achieve the real, lasting advantage of the interaction. This is because the public forums where most Social Media interactions occur blasts the value way past the benefits of a phone (and the potential damage way past angry phone calls), as it’s more than only communication, it’s marketing and establishing how the very brand of your company is perceived.
So as Magnotti and O’Driscoll proclaim, don’t worry about Social Media ROI, worry about the new age of business persuasion for how to turn people into customers.
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[...] building our small business software-house the social media way. More than anything else, we see social media as being all about communication, and consider it a game changer for how people transfer information and their thoughts alike. Given [...]
Great post Harry. Love the questions at the start… it’s so true we don’t ask about the ROI on our phones, etc. We KNOW the value of them! My question is how much time do you recommend that a small business invest daily into social media and communicating with their customers?
Great question, Dawn! I believe the social media time a small business spends depends a lot on what you are trying to get out of it. This is because some of the most time-consuming aspects are researching and learning new systems, and then following up by experimenting to find out how to make them work for you.
If a small business wants to make sure that they are listening to their customers and providing customer service through these outlets, it is not overly time consuming to get up and running and make sure these people aren’t howling into the wind (or calling a company’s phone number with no answer). Once you’re up and running especially, even under an hour a day could suffice here—-although it may be distributed over the court of the day/night, as it’s best to provide this service in as close to real time as possible.
However, if they want to further market the company and find new customers that would not otherwise call/email/tweet/etc., then there is more of a learning curve for how to do this well. There are all sorts of tools and practices that can be employed to develop relationships in which you can persuade people to become customers.
There is no limit to the amount of time that you can spend here, as you can develop an entire ecosystem in which you have a community marketing your company and transitioning people within their networks into customers. For here, once you have made the initial investments and have established processes to do this (not necessarily an easy feat), then time investment will depend entirely on how committed you are to the medium at large.
Changing a company’s business model to reflect the ongoing revolution in communication may be like turning a giant ship around—-little changes in trajectory matter a whole lot, but it still may take a long time to transition to new objectives.
Thanks for the response. I think the biggest challenge for small businesses is finding enough time to make connections without just selling and pushing products. It seems like so many biz out there are just shouting at their potential customers without any interaction whatsoever. We definitely don’t want to be like that. On the other hand, finding time and balance to truly listen and interact is tough.
Couldn’t agree more about finding quality time that avoids being pushy for sales. Shouting is not a good way to be persuasive, and companies that do so do not understand the change social media represents in customer relations.
You’re right that it can be tough to commit the sort of time necessary to really use these tools correctly though. At the same time, if you do successfully listen and interact, and learn about how you can transition people into customers more efficiently by discovering what they think and want, the rewards could exceedingly justify the time allocation…