From Our Brains to Yours

March 9th, 2009

Return on engagement

Sarah Evans has a great checklist over at Mashable: “Social Media for Business, The Do’s and Don’t for Sharing.”

  • Be transparent and authentic. Be Human – Create or join a discussion, don’t yell to a crowd.
  • A profile pic is worth a thousand tweets – does your pic help tell your story?
  • Leaving a Legacy – what you tweet or share today is google tomorrow (good and bad)
  • Don’t be a social schizo – the more often you talk fewer things (relevant to your brand), the more you’ll get from your audience.
  • Social climbing is not the best approach – it’s not just about finding people who have audiences you can tap into, but also about finding audiences that want to follow you.
  • It’s not a one-stop shop
  • Return on engagement – More on this below
  • Best advice? Don’t take anyone else’s advice – you know your brand better than anyone.

The checklist was written for business, but it applies to anyone who has a brand to build or promote – nonprofits, campaigns, etc.

As you can imagine, my favorite is return on engagement (ROE).  With limited resources (time being the key resource for social media, since it’s virtually free), how do you get your proverbial money’s worth?  Evans lists a few different metrics that can be used to meausre ROE:

  • Incoming traffic from links
  • Number of people subscribed to RSS feeds
  • Number of people/friends/supporters on your Facebook/myspace/LinkedIn/ group, fan page, etc.
  • Trackbacks to your blog posts
  • Conversation tracking tools like Twitter Search
  • Comments on blog posts
  • Increases sales and inquiries (I would say increase in donations, new email list subscribers, messages sent to your Congressman, etc.)

Social media is yet another set of online tools that can be used to good effect – and those effects can be measured.  As always, the first question should be: what does your organization want to accomplish?  Then you can decide what types of social media to use and what metrics will help you evaluate your success in using them – your return on engagement.

I definitely recommend reading the full post at Mashable.

-Stephen

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