Books, Blogs, and Beyond

16 Flavors of Social Media ROi

By Tom Collins

Yvonne and I spoke recently on social media to Paul Nelson's MBA class in Marketing at the Simon Graduate School of Business. I spent most of my segment talking about the business benefits of social media from a slide with this graphic:

 

This series will explore a multi-faceted approach to ROi that, I think, should drive everything from initial strategy and planning, to your day-to-day online interactions, to what you measure and what you do with the results. The focus is moved away from analytics, toward analysis. Away from automatically counting these and tracking those. Toward understanding how engaging in social media can create business value and then seeing whether your involvement needs course adjustment.

So, what are my 16 flavors?

Business Blogs: Build It and They Will Come

By Yvonne DiVita and George Kittredge

Roughly ten years ago, when businesses started to realize that they should have websites, and decided that they needed to hire professional website designers to build it - their thinking was, "Build it and they will come."

We are reminded of the 1989 movie, Field of Dreams, and that one great scene where James Earl Jones as Terrance Mann says, "People will come, Ray...And they'll pass over the money without even thinking about it."

Ah yes, being on the Internet held tremendous promise - all those millions of eyeballs gazing at your stuff. And they'll come and pass over the money. Many, many businesses jumped on the Internet band wagon and waited and...waited, and...waited, and some are still waiting.

"Find Your Passion and Stand for Something Before You Die!"

By Tom Collins

There's some good advice.

It was given by our dear friend, author, and client, Dr. Claudia Thomas — through tears — as she spoke to a crowd gathered to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Africana Studies program at Vassar College.

Claudia spoke with authority. She risked her future, as a Vassar student back in 1969, leading 33 other young women in the takeover of the college's administative offices. Their purpose was to insist on a list of nine demands, including establishment of the experimental Black Studies program as a degree program with its own faculty and facilities. 

From today's perspective, it may be hard to appreciate how much Claudia and her classmates were putting on the line. After all, they won and their story is an accepted part of Vassar's history.