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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