How much does social media cost?
Q1: “How much does social media cost?”
Q2: “What’s the ROI of social media?”
A1 : “I don’t know.”
A2: “I don’t care.”
I’m being glib. Let me explain my answers in more detail.
I presented preliminary findings from our research into the web, social media, and R&D activities of over 500 of the largest architecture and engineering firms in North America to the AIA CEO Large Firm Roundtable last week. During the question and answer session, one of the CEOs (whose firm participates very lightly in social media) asked about the costs and benefits of social media programs.
Here’s an abbreviated version of my answer:
“I don’t believe that firms should have a standalone social media program. Social media activities should be integrated into larger strategies for the firm, including thought leadership, research and development, recruiting and retention, and knowledge sharing. In addition, social media (or digital) activities should complement your face to face (or analog) activities such as speaking at conferences or running client workshops.
For example, if I develop a presentation based on research that our company conducted using both analog and digital methods, travel around the country giving the presentation, return home, carve the presentation up into a series of blog posts, share them via LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, and then give an interview to an industry journalist about our findings — is that social media spending? If so, which part? How would I begin to separate out the costs and attribute them directly to social media? Or perhaps more to the point, how would I attribute revenue to the social media component of those efforts?”
I suppose we could review our client list, identify which clients (to the best of our knowledge) learned about us through our social media efforts, sum up their fees to date, and apply a sort of “social media finder’s fee” to them to determine the value of our program. Yet that would be ignoring the fact that we still had to close them once we began talking about our software and services, that our ideas had to be interesting, our products had to be compelling, and because our business depends on repeat clients, we have to keep innovating as well as providing outstanding service.
I know on a deeply intuitive level that social media provides a huge benefit for our firm, because I can see and feel it working firsthand.”
At that point Phil Harrison of Perkins+Will chimed in:
“Trying to answer the question ‘how much does social media cost?’ is like trying to answer the question ‘how much does sustainability cost?’
If you are doing either one of them right, your efforts are so integrated that it is impossible to measure them as an individual component, you just do them because it is the right way to operate.”
Several heads nodded in agreement, especially among the firms that have been early to adopt social media.
I sat next to Phil on the bus ride to dinner. We began to explore his analogy further. I proposed the idea of “socialwash,” which puts a social veneer on a firm’s marketing efforts.
Like socialwash spending, greenwash spending is easy to track, since the approach of greenwashing involves spending money to generate the appearance of sustainability, not deeply integrating it into a building or an organization.
If one wants to socialwash their firm, they can hire a design agency to create a beautiful blog or hire a PR firm to tweet on their behalf. The costs of doing so should be easy to track. We discussed a loose rule of thumb for tracking social media costs — “If you can clearly account for your social media spending, you are probably doing it wrong.”
Back to my original answer to the questions of social media costs and ROI, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
I don’t know how much social media costs because I think it is both impossible and cost prohibitive to measure what you actually spend on social media if you have integrated it into the way your firm operates.
I don’t care about the ROI of social media because I think that moving towards social media is inevitable, so it is better to get in the game and make a few mistakes than to sit on the sideline until you completely understand the rules.
Technology moves so fast these days that you want to start learning as soon as possible, even if you have to begin without a clear understanding of the financial implications. Perhaps instead of ROI, we should be discussing CONI, the Cost Of Not Investing?
Good article, and very timely. Curiously, our BIM program has recently been under fire a bit for starting up a blog and having some Twitter and FB presence to bring visitors to the site. When working for a public agency, all that we do is under the microscope, yet we need to keep a level of transparency to the public and to those competing for work.
That being said, my team invested its “shoestring” resources to set up a blog so that we can share some of the lessons learned or latest developments in our program, without getting in to the details of any specific project. We also use some of the pages to keep up to date with current technology, and tap in to other resources to create a local calendar of BIM Events to help raise the level of BIM awarenss in Southern California. We even connected our discussion forums to LinkedIn since we saw a lot more traffic there. The infrastrucutre itself cost us nothing. All of these sites are free at their basic level, and we have a couple of clever people on our staff with basic HTML skills to tie a few things together.
To me, the only real investment is the amount of time your team puts in, and amount your employer or company will compensate for your effort. Some people see social media as an “after hours” project, which unfortunately, much of our effort has become. But the real return of investment would be to actually allow a few of your employees to take some of your assigned work time and be able to dedicate it to social media. Even two to four hours dedicated to working on your company social media might also make your team a bit more ‘productive’ for the company because many of those users will likely spend the time on social media for themselves anyway. Might as well leverage some of that effort to work for you.