ROI of a Community Manager
Written by Connie Bensen on July 27, 2008 – 5:55 pm -
There have been many references to ROI in terms of social media. A couple of my favorites are:
- Return on Influence
- Return on Interaction
There has been a lot of discussion recently about the Community Manager position.And the article in the WSJ about the Deloitte study brought out many from the industry in defense of communities. My take was that it underlines the importance of the community manager role. Brian Solis recently had an article on the new MarComm. He highlights why companies need to start considering marketing in relational terms.
A friend that’s a VP of Marketing of an Open Source solution says it provides 12x the valuation at his company.
Here are a list of returns:
- Humanize the company by providing a voice
- Nurture the community & encourage growth
- Communicate directly with the customers
- Connect customers to appropriate internal departments
- Ensure that messaging will connect
- Build brand awareness through word of mouth
- Lower market research costs
- Add more points in the purchase cycle
- Provide support to customers that have fallen thru the cracks
- More satisfied customers because they’ve been involved with product development
- Shorten length of product development cycle
- Build public relations for brand with influentials in the industry
- Identify strengths & weaknesses of competitors
- Collaborate & partner with related organizations
- Provide industry trends to the executive level
Your first comment will be - there aren’t any numbers there! You know your organization best so I’ll let you decide what value each of those offers. There are other factors to consider before deciding if you need a community manager, but I hope that that list starts you thinking about the value of the position.
Have I forgotten any?
Posted in community marketing |
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July 28th, 2008 at 9:46 am
There aren’t any numbers there!
This is a great list of the the areas where a company may garner value from social media. I don’t have anything to add there.
But, I continue to have a beef with any effort to co-opt/redefine “ROI” to make it “fit” with social media. ROI is about “what did we spend, and what did we get from it?” By redefining ROI in either of the ways listed at the beginning of this post, it becomes, “what did we get from what we got?” In other words, in order to *have* “interaction” or to gain “influence”…you still have to make an investment.
I’m not saying don’t try to assess the value. Take the list you provided. Determine if the “value” is best represented in monetary terms or some other term — it’s got to be in something that decision-makers in the company buy into and agree to. AND, it’s got to take into account that it will take time to see the results — maybe more time than the company typically likes to wait. This requires thinking about the value and putting together a strong story around why that value is real and important. It’s risky to base that story on “ROI in this world means ‘investment’ is not part of the equation.”
July 28th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
[…] let it go. And I do think this is important. Connie Bensen’s recent post (cross-posted on the Marketing 2.0 blog) on the subject had me cheering…and crying…at the same […]
July 29th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Great post Connie. The only thing I would add to your list is:
- Be an internal champion for the community
In my experience there are always people within the company who don’t get it, are skeptics/doubters, want to participate but don’t know how, forget the community exists, etc.
It’s part of the community manager’s job to continuously engage, remind, encourage and inspire these people.
Jay
August 4th, 2008 at 5:48 am
One has to think back to every new program brought into the corporate world. Why spend thousands on becoming ISO9000, Reingineering a company or reorganizing divisions. Our companies have had decades to study, dissect, research and design current systems. Everyone is swimming upstream trying to learn how to develop Internet strategies in just a year. More details are available at http://www.internetdough.NET where you can download the book Internet Dough OR the white paper, “Six P’s of Building Online Community.
Keep building and learning. You have to be where your customers are at. The low cost of building community and using social media and the dozens of best practices included in Internet Dough should convince any executive that the ROI is more than a company sponsored golf outing!
Don