| Blanchard
describes social media integration into an organization from the very
basics through to the explicit determination of the ROI. He does not
give many examples of companies having used this, but that only makes
the book better. Good examples can be found in many other books, but
the real search for the establishment of ROI in social media campaigns
is usually not mentioned in them.
What
Blanchard does very well, is integrate social media into the essence
of business, showing that none of the general reasons for Social
media counts within business: follows, likes, positive sentiment
and the likes do not count at all in business, because they have
no relation to sales. It is all about opportunity costs: if we cut
costs from marketing campaign A to fund social media campaign B,
will this campaign B bring in more sales than campaign A would have?
As long as this question cannot be answered you cannot decide to
go for social media or not.
His
final chapters that then go deeper into connecting the ROI to social
media are a bit thin, but the overall idea is very clear and he
gives some good hints how and where to look for a connection to
sales in your own campaign. The biggest problem however is that
no two campaigns, businesses and especially goals are the same and
thus you need to follow his principles and find your own link with
sales.
He
does add a great idea with his use of the FRY accronym to grow sales
in general and in this case with social media: to grow by Frequency
(increase number of interactions with existing customers), Reach
(increase number of new customers) and Yield (increase how much
each existing customer buys). If you look at it this way, it is
a lot easier to determine how you will measure the ROI of your social
media campaign.
A
truly interesting book, which will help you get buy-in from the
management team when you wish to start a social media campaign.
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Social
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