“If I asked the people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”
Here’s the truth people seem to be dancing around: Measuring Social Media ROI is f-ing hard.
Unless you transact all of your business online, or track every sale at the register, you’re not going to get accurate ROI numbers for social media. You can ask for magic software all you want, but unless you’re ready to devote serious time and resources, no brilliant programmers are giving to give you the report you want to show your boss/investors/marketing heads.
I’m not suggesting that ROI metrics don’t exist. Of course you can measure audience engagement, fan-base growth, conversions on your website, clicks, etc. My argument is that these are just the tip of the iceberg. The real, astounding impact is the low hum that is emanating around the new breed of socially aware businesses, just under the surface of metrics.
The real return on Social Media is so much simpler. You either do it and reap the benefits of community, or you don’t and you watch your competition steal your customers.
Here are a few personal examples of social media returns from my own experiences, and I am confident these aren’t unique to me; I have seen a tweet from Zappos and visited their site to buy a few pairs of shoes. I have gone to eat at places I saw my friends frequenting via Foursquare. I have attended functions that people talked about on Facebook. I have hired people through recommendations on LinkedIn.
There’s a 99% chance none of these businesses know that my money originated through social media channels. Does that make it any less real? Shit no.
Eventually their bottom line will expose the benefits, but there are too many outside factors (the economy, the season, our fickle society) to paint an accurate picture.
There are people who bought a house through a realtor because of a blog post they read, who don’t even recall that’s how they first heard of the agent.
People have had good experiences at restaurants and shared it with thousands of their Twitter followers. They’ve never written a Yelp review in their life.
There’s a customer right now who’s thinking about changing providers, but will get exceptional customer service through social media and become a life-long customer.
This is the reality of social media ROI. We’ll get better at measuring it over time, but until then, stop waiting for the ‘hard numbers’ to get involved. Your competition is basking in the love.
Fun Fact: In February of this year, I uncovered a tweet about a new Venture fund in Chicago (where I live) while using the software that my team built. That same Venture Fund invested in my business in April. That’s millions of dollars in ROI on both sides in less than 140 characters. That’s the world we live in now.
Over the past few years we’ve constantly been looking for tools to help us be faster and more efficient. It takes a while sometimes to determine if a tool will really fit into our processes, these ones have all made the cut.
In no particular order, I consider these my must-have tools;
xMind: All of my ideas and product development processes start in xMind. It’s a simple, powerful and free mind-mapping tool for Mac & PC. I’m sure most people are wired differently, but this is by far the most efficient way to organize my thoughts and ideas.
Balsamiq Mockups: I resisted Balsamiq for mock-up work for a long time. I couldn’t find anything that worked the way I wanted it to, so I tried Balsamiq again. After forcing myself to do a few projects with it, I can’t imagine using anything else. We do our actual mock-ups in Adobe CS, but before I have off ideas to my UI/UX guy, most of the layout and usability work is done in Balsamiq.
DropBox: Holy crap - I don’t know why it took me so long to discover DropBox. We use this to share files and synch between desktop/laptop so I can work anywhere with my latest files. When we start the design process, Gil can look at my mind-map’s from xMind and my mock-ups and know exactly what I was thinking when he starts putting it to real pixels.
Pivotal Tracker: It takes a while to get a good rhythm with Pivotal Tracker, but this is the tool everyone on the team works from. All of our current iteration items live here, our feature backlog, bugs, tweaks, etc. It’s another free tool that makes managing a software development much easier.
Highrise: Light contact management from 37Signals for those who don’t need something as cumbersome as salesforce, but can’t stand managing contacts in Outlook/Gmail. It’s a simple elegant product and this is where I keep track of all of my important contacts. I don’t use it to it’s full ability yet, but I’ll get there.
Adobe Creative Suite: As I mentioned, all of our heavy design work happens in Photoshop/Illustrator. I can’t use them for shit, but as a team we’ve found it much more efficient to design here than in the web layer. Many people prefer to design in HTML/CSS. We find it more efficient to be pixel-perfect before we get to that stage, and then let the software engineers bring it to life.
Google Analytics: This one is obvious. Either Chris Dixon or Dave McClure (I can’t remember which) said a founders job is to figure out which metrics are important, and improve them. Google Analytics has all the data we need to develop our growth and engagement strategies.
KISSInsights: Extremely useful in-app survey tool. User feedback is critical, and this tool makes it super simple to get it.
Survey.io: Also from the KISSMetrics crew, Survey.IO is a simple, elegant way to get more detailed feedback from your users. It’s not a new concept, SurveyMonkey and others have been around forever - but you’ll appreciate the simplicity and execution of this product.
What are your favorite tools? Am I missing any that I should check out?
Note: These are direct links to product pages, I do not have any business relationships with these companies.
- Added Tessa Auza (@sproutsupport) to the Sprout Social Team! One of our first fanatical users is now helping our other users. Really excited to have her on board!
- Discovered Pattern Tap - an awesome website for design inspiration.
- Our friend Ryan Graves (@ryangraves) had his first big @UberCab weekend! Great startup disrupting the transportation business.
- Discovered Dropbox. Not sure how I lived without it. Files synced everywhere and shares with the team are super simple.
- Sprout Social growing around 20% in traffic daily. Can’t even keep up with the beta signup requests!
- Great meetings with RapLeaf, ConstantContact, Lightbank, and others
- Recovering quickly from surgery
- Our friends @KISSMetrics are building amazing tools. If you have a website, you need to give it a look. Haven’t made the surveys live on the site yet, but soon.
- Found the secret sauce for our launch marketing. It’s secret, and it’s saucy.
“
In software development, are you crushing the final 10%? It’s the difference between becoming ‘the’ brand by solving the hard problems and being lost in a sea of similar products…
“Laying out the design of a page or a flyer so it looks like a pro did it takes about ten times as much work as merely using the template Microsoft builds in for free, and the message is almost the same…
Except it’s not. Of course not. The message is not the same.”
The last ten percent is the signal we look for, the way we communicate care and expertise and professionalism. If all you’re doing is the standard amount, all you’re going to get is the standard compensation. The hard part is the last ten percent, sure, or even the last one percent, but it’s the hard part because everyone is busy doing the easy part already.”
Crazy good.
My puppy Charlie. Or Charles if he’s being annoying.
