The ROI from Social Media?

It is always satisfying to present the monthly PR report to senior managers, the front page boldly highlighting the departments ROI - calculated in terms of ad value. I love to watch the smile spread across the ‘bean counters’ and managers’ faces as they swim in the zeros in front of them.

With PR being still not being understood by some executives, demonstrating ROI in terms of a monetary value helps justify the value of PR, as the age old adage says, ‘money talks’. While I don’t believe this is the best way to measure the true value of PR it is an important requirement in requesting budget.

One of the main obstacles facing PR practitioners’ wishing to spend money on social media is the question of how to demonstrate ROI? A recent study by e-marketer found that only 16% of those polled said they currently measured ROI for their social media programs and more than 40% of the respondents were not even aware if social media tools had ROI measurement capabilities.

There are a few sites around that offer free social media analysis - Google Analytics, PostRank Analytics, Viral Heat and Crimson Hexagon. These offer a range of tools and functions to track visitors from referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents. Viral heat and crimson hexagon also track sentiment, i.e. whether the information is negative or positive, this is useful to look at before implementing or changing a social media strategy.

While these sites are good and offer a solution for analyzing social media, they do not offer a way to calculate a monetary ROI. If PR practitioners want to increase spend on social media they will need to be better able to justify the ROI, in my opinion the tools to do this are still weak. I would strongly advocate the development of industry standards for social media evaluation. This would enable different campaigns to evaluated against each other and executives to educated to understand one set of benchmarks.

Have you been FLOGGED?

How often do you question the authenticity of the blogs you read? Never, well you could be the subject of a flog! A flog is essentially a fake blog that appears to originate from a credible, non-biased source, but, which in fact is created by a company.

Over the years there have been numerous examples of high profile flog scandals, some linked to high profile international PR agencies and their clients. Three years ago, Edelman was responsible for a fake Wal-Mart blog called ‘Wal-Marting’ across America. It featured the journey of a couple as they traveled across America in their RV (recreational v

ehicle), during which they parked their RV in friendly Wal-Mart's parking lots. They weren't customers though; they were writers being paid to blog positively about Wal-Mart.

In another case, Edelman was accused of bribing bloggers to write favorable reviews of Microsoft's new Vista operating system after it sent a group of top bloggers top-of-the-range Acer Ferrari notebook computers, pre-loaded with Windows Vista.

In both these cases bloggers were quick to condemn the companies, in the first case the blog was removed. In the latter, following the bribery allegations, Microsoft encouraged the bloggers to donate the laptops to charities after they had tried and reviewed Vista.

Another tactic being used by companies today is - pay-per-post blogs. Bloggers are offered cash to write about products. Disclosure is optional, and often the bloggers are required to only express positive comments.

Is there anything wrong with flogs?

I don’t believe there is. Is there any difference between a company creating a ‘flog’ and sending out a press release or paying for an advertorial? There have been calls recently to regulate blogs; despite not being practical this is also is a form of censorship.

However there is an ethical debate surrounding this subject that should make PR practitioners think twice before recommending such a tactic to a client. If PR wants to establish its self as a profession, it needs to establish a code of conduct that by nature advocates honesty and transparency. A flog is not ethical, practitioners need to decide what is more important –establishing a profession or acting to promote a company at whatever cost.

Should rumor mongers be held accountable?

On the 6th of January last year the live feed of the MacWorld keynote was hacked, and the message “Steve Jobs just died was posted”. The false rumor exploited speculation that had been surrounding the health of the Apple CEO at the time. Despite the rumor being pulled down within the hour it was still enough time for the ‘news’ to become viral. This resulted in the Apple stock loosing 10% of its value ($4.8 billion USD) in its first hour of trading.

In a similar situation, last week, a rumor was posted on a blog in Bahrain claiming that Gulf Air (the Kingdom’s national carrier) had flown a number of Bahraini officials to a meeting in Tel Aviv, Israel. The story was accompanied by a photo of two of the airlines cabin crew standing outside a building with Israel emblazoned on the side. It was captioned by - Gulf Air loves Israel. The blog is in Arabic so I haven’t posted it.

Anything relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict is very sensitive in the Middle East and the fallout from such an allegation could have potentially serious political ramifications both locally and regionally.

The rumor is incorrect and the photo is a misrepresentation; it was taken last year outside the Israeli stand at the Paris airshow. Yet, the damage has been done, the story is now circulating on the main blogs in Bahrain and I predict it will hit the media this week, resulting in a lot of very negative coverage for the airline. We have taken a number of measures to correct this misinformation however people will still question it, as the age-old adage says, ‘there is no smoke without fire’.

Both of these examples illustrate the power of new media and the serious damage that it can do to companies in terms of brand reputation and bottom line. Information travels instantaneously, globally and unfiltered. All it takes is one person to start a rumor; this can be done anonymously through an alias.

My question is – should people be held accountable for writing and circulating potentially damaging incorrect information? If a person chooses to hide behind a cloak of anonymity to deliberately cause damage, surely this amounts to a criminal act and should be punishable by law? I believe so, the problem is that there are currently no formal laws governing cyberspace and global legislation seems relatively far-fetched at this stage. As the Internet continues to grow, governments and legislators will need to consider this. What are your thoughts, do you agree with me or do you think this amounts to Internet censorship?

Hello and a cautionary note.....

Dear All,

Now that I have finished basking in the accomplishment of successfully setting up my own blog and twitter account, I am left with a nagging feeling of overexposure. This may have something to do with an incident that happened to a colleague of mine a few years ago, before she worked out how to apply the full privacy settings in facebook! :-)

Following a promising business pitch, our potential new clients decided to do some research of their own. They googled the name of the PR agency and the proposed account director (my colleague). Unfortunately a picture of her wearing her beach attire was not what they expected to see, this was made worse by the fact that the clients represented a very conservative Islamic bank, needless to to say we did not win the business. My colleague then spent hours trying to work out how to remove the photo, including contacting google, unfortunately all to no avail.

So please be warned ..... be careful what you post on the internet, it can damage to your career!

Happy blogging.

Katherine