Selling Social Media to the C-suite: Lead with Engagement
Posted by Dave Armon on Fri, Oct 30, 2009
Engagement has taken over as the measurement standard for those seeking to quantify the time, money and intellectual capital they are spending in social media. According to social media thought leaders (like Katie Paine or Jeremiah Owyang), it is infinitely more valuable to build sustainable, interactive relationships with customers online than to reach a wide audience with a single universal message.
Nonetheless, if that's the case, how should a PR professional balance attempts to build a meaningful following without getting distracted with too many individual conversations? Debra Askanase, former non-profit exec and now head of Community Organizer 2.0, argues that the key is in qualifying the value of those relationships in reports to executives. As she noted in "The Case of the 4,000 Twitter Followers Who Don't Care" on her blog:
"What I discovered was that, of the 4,000+ followers (on a client's Twitter account), only three were truly interested enough in what the organization was tweeting. Three. Twitter utilizes the concept of social media karma: give and give and then others will give back. This company didn't offer help, advice, support or anything else personal. Obviously, Twitter did not drive people to the website - no one cared enough about the company to go there."
It's easy to build a large following using Twitter. Simply follow as many users as possible, then 'unfollow' anyone who hasn't followed you back within a couple of days. A few hours of work can easily lead to a thousand Twitter followers. But do those relationships lead to sales?
Askanase goes on to illustrate, step-by-step, how to evaluate the quality of an organization's existing social media following and how to build significant relationships without getting distracted by individual conversations. In the case of the two most prevalent social networks being used by marketing and PR today, Askanase has two simple pieces of advice:
- Continue to measure the number of followers on Twitter, but vet them first.
- Only include the number of 'valued' followers or Facebook fans in reports to the c-suite
It's this kind of triage that will allow PR departments will stay on track to cultivating new, real relationships without losing track of the existing social media relationships the company has already developed.