social media |

Call me old-fashioned – and I’m certainly a digital immigrant rather than a digital native – but I have always understood business to be about generating revenue and profit. Hard cash is the only business metric that matters.

Which is perhaps why I find the metrics in social media – whose success is judged by the number of retweets, mentions, click-throughs and blog comments – to be too soft and intangible. And I struggle to see meaning in those soft metrics if they’re not pegged to business ones.

I’m tussling with how we evaluate the business impact of social media. I’m looking for the return on investment in time and effort: is it money in, or just money out? And I’m searching for the right tools with which to measure it. Most importantly, I’m assessing whether it is bringing us any tangible business benefits – if, indeed, it can.

The social media conundrum, for me, has reverberations of the debate about above and below-the-line marketing that has been going on for longer than I can remember.

From all my years in marketing and PR I’ve learned that communications need to be kept as simple and as cost-effective as possible. In that context, through the mist of tweets and blogs emerges the glimmer of understanding that social media is all about business relationships and promotion. It’s about being ‘seen’ by the business world; about showcasing your credentials, building brand awareness, and shaping the perception of your business.

This has always been a key influencing factor in any PR a company does, and indeed can affect a client’s decision when selecting or shortlisting potential candidates for business opportunities. I am therefore slowly coming to the conclusion that having a social media presence can softly and subliminally influence the buying process and decision-making – even though it cannot be directly attributed to the bottom line.

People make assessments and judgements about businesses a million times a day via their online presence. The question company bosses are asking themselves is not: can we afford to be part of it? Rather, it’s: can we afford not to be?

My view is that we have to be visible on the web, which has become much more than a shop window: it is a powerful tell and sell mechanism that none of us can afford to ignore. Even the old-fashioned ones among us.

Why do companies blog? I’m beginning to question whether they do it for ego reasons, or whether there is a legitimate corporate purpose in posting news and opinions week on week.

Is blogging perhaps a modern-day emperor dressed in what he thinks is savvy social-media garb, when really it’s a transparent excuse to swagger through the blogosphere and parade his presumptions?

OK, so I’m aware of the supposed benefits of clothing my company’s communications with pithy, insightful nuggets of information and opinion every week:

Providing fresh content helps with the search engine optimisation of my website. I Google my name, and a link to my latest blog post appears on the first page, second only to my LinkedIn profile.
Blogging on issues close to my heart, and where I share my expertise and experience, can make me a ‘thought leader’ in my field.
Blogging can humanise the company and its profile – in theory giving potential clients a better feel for whether we’re the kind of people they’d like to do business with.
It opens the doors to feedback and interaction with customers and stakeholders.
If we blog consistently, rather than intermittently, it creates a subliminal suggestion that we are a company to be relied on and trusted.

Those benefits feel rather lofty to me. And, on top of blogging, there’s the rest of the social media landscape for the emperor to engage with: tweets, retweets, mentions and thank-yous on Twitter; LinkedIn groups to interact with; and Facebook status updates to respond to.

It makes me wonder what we did before blogging and social networking came along? Are we kidding ourselves filling up blog space every week with stuff that people don’t read and don’t care about? Is it commercially viable, or is our time better spent doing something else? Most importantly, are current clients, and potential new ones, more likely to do business with us?

I’d love to hear from you if you are reading and engaging with this blog. What do you think? And what do you want from a corporate blog like this?

Is Emperor Blog egotistically in the all-together, or does he have a finely stitched, eloquently worded, business-building purpose?

Answers on the bottom of this blog post, please.