{"id":626,"date":"2009-12-17T10:00:19","date_gmt":"2009-12-17T17:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/briantroy.com\/blog\/?p=626"},"modified":"2009-12-17T10:00:19","modified_gmt":"2009-12-17T17:00:19","slug":"social-media-roi-the-believers-and-non-believers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/2009\/12\/17\/social-media-roi-the-believers-and-non-believers\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Media ROI – The Believers and Non-Believers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It appears the Social Media ROI conversation is heating up – and predictably it has split into two camps, the Believers and the Non-Belivers.<\/p>\n

The non-belivers are adamant that you simply can’t value conversations. The believers say you can because relationships are valuable. They are both wrong (and right).<\/p>\n

Let me try to clarify things – conversations have zero tangible hard value – you can’t put a specific dollar figure on the value of any conversation. In that respect the non-believers are correct. The believers tell you that conversations are valuable because they affect some other valuable thing – and they are correct (however they insist on pointing to the wrong affected things).<\/p>\n

Here is a great example:<\/p>\n

Shel Israel<\/a> – who is very bright and who I have immense respect for – is one of the non-belivers. KD Paine<\/a> – of whom I have no previous knowledge – is one of the believers (at least for the purposes of this post).<\/p>\n

Ms. Paine wrote a post<\/a> taking issue with Mr. Israel’s assertion from his blog<\/a> that there is value in conversation that can not be measured.<\/p>\n

The way to measure the value of conversations is to first measure the degree to which people trust you<\/a>, and the degree to which your stakeholders are satisfied and committed to your relationship<\/a>s. Find out just how valuable people think those relationships are. Then start a conversation and measure how much MORE valuable people think the relationship after you’ve been talking with them awhile.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think we would all agree that these statements are accurate – but do they assign hard value to conversations? No, in fact this is simply a list of other intangibles that conversations affect. Ms. Paine lists tangibles (i.e., lowered costs across several functions) but never comes out and says that conversations lower costs in functions x, y and z.<\/p>\n

It isn’t that Ms. Paine is terribly far off – it is just that she refuses to make a well formed argument that translates to a hard dollar ROI. She simply refuses to connect the dots and commit to a hard dollar outcome from her “conversations”.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Mr. Israel posits this thought experiment via Tweet:<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/p>\n

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Mr. Israel makes the opposite mistake – he is essentially telling us that unless you can directly connect an action with it’s effect you can’t call it an ROI. If that were true about 85% of corporate spending would stop today.<\/p>\n

So, just for fun, I’ll complete Mr. Israel’s thought experiment:<\/p>\n

First let’s figure out the investment:<\/p>\n