Blogposts

Let me tell you a little story first. I stayed in a...

What's the ROI of social media? Every time you try to change a company to be less about traditional ads and more about acts and conversations, this mother of all questions pops up. One could argue that doing remarkable things and acting conversation-worthy on every brand level increases Net Promoter Score (and there is a correlation between Net Promoter Score and profit). One could argue that an open company culture builds profit (and could even point to Zappos as an example). But a lot of managers, especially in the early stage of implementing conversations, will discard these arguments as fluffy social media guru and communications speak. One could argue that collecting 'likes' or fans is a great idea (see my ideas on that). Or one could show views, clicks and impressions. But really, does that prove conversations work?

Many recent brand efforts are designed to end up in user streams,...

How to engage in conversations? How are we managing consumer expectations as soon as we're start answering questions on social media? Many companies just do social media campaigns and fail to have a follow up on their social media efforts. In other words: they do a great campaign to attract people to their Facebook fanpage, but fail to answer the questions and solve the problems of this new crowd. In a conversation era, there is no marketing without service. On top of that, there's the dilemma of managing expectations: many don't wan't to open 'the floodgates' on consumers reacting on their online efforts, just because they have the perception (or self-knowledge) that they won't be able to handle that. They adopt a more reactive approach on what's happening online, maybe to, someday, change into a more proactive conversations company. That's why we usually plot conversations efforts on proactive versus reactive axes and service versus marketing axes.

Being conversation-worthy, having consumers and clients talk about you. That’s pretty high...