Does your Engagement Strategy have a Value?

Some people may be under the impression that in the world of Brand Management 2.0, your value is tied to your follower ratio—the number of people you follow versus the number of people following you—whether it is 1 to 1, 2 to 1 or even greater.  Others use a litmus test based solely on the amount of tweets and status updates in your profile.

We disagree.  In fact, we find these metrics to be shortsighted.

At the onset of social networking (excluding blogs), it became necessary for the social influencers to distinguish themselves by building up hundreds or thousands of followers who hung on every tweet, and retweeted it to their band of merry men (and women).  This sentiment is tantamount to “trending,” and to be effective at marketing, one must always think beyond the trends.

These relationships may have a value for authors, speakers and gurus, and while we hope that value extends beyond ego, there is no qualitative proof that large friend list will translate into sales for businesses of any sizes.  Twitter is currently the leader among social networks for free brand advertising (brand mentions), but we believe it has more to do with customer sentiment (paid or otherwise), than it does with the aforementioned metrics.  

Every day, newspapers distributed worldwide contain ads, once considered a leading trend in advertising, and while millions of eyeballs see these ads, few of those readers end up in stores to make purchases.  This paradigm is the equivalent of building a large online following but not converting even a few website visitors into actual buyers.

Without a proper ROI, your campaign may become a case study for agencies and the students at Harvard Business School to review, but none of them will want to be associated with your business, no matter how many brand ambassadors you have acquired.

Social media campaigns should be about the impact not window dressing.  Businesses of all sizes have resisted attempts by CMOs and agencies to implement social media campaigns because they didn’t want to pay for services that simply increase brand awareness but can’t prove they increased their sales.

After all, it wasn’t until recent that tools became available for measuring and monitoring customer sentiment as well as the click-thru rates of short URLs and the source and volume of the traffic to your website. 

The quality of your campaign, based on its content, will lead to more sales than the number of followers and status updates.  Yes, tweets, retweets and the right followers will have an impact on the success of your social campaign, but they are only a fraction of the ingredients in this recipe.

Widget installations, tagging, ratings, reviews and bookmarking have their value, qualitatively and quantitatively.  They as well as an understanding of how your social campaign will complement your efforts in other channels should not be forsaken or forgotten during the planning process.

And that leads us to the most important element used for successful social campaigns.  A carefully crafted strategy and well-written content will always trump the window dressing. 

One could even argue that the right mix of 140 characters and an effective hashtag are more likely to place your business on the Drudge Report or get you an interview on CNN, and cause a tenfold increase in web traffic to your online store, than any old tweet to your 1,000 friends and followers.