In the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, you might remember the scene where Alec Baldwin, the sleazy sales boss, tells his struggling sales team that the highly coveted Glengarry sales leads are only "for closers". His character (Blake) is by most measures pretty ruthless, focused on closing deals at any cost. While his approach is extreme, he touches on a principle most marketers are missing in our approach to social media impact.
The kinds of social media measurements we tend to focus on are similar to what one might measure if managing the activity of a salesperson. How many calls are made? How many meetings are set up? How many opportunities are in their pipeline? Are they establishing rapport with the prospect? Are they maintaining the relationship with the prospect? All totally legitimate questions, but if you had a salesperson who was doing all those things well for a long period of time and never made a sale, would you consider them successful? Probably not.
We tend to talk about performance measurement in terms we're familiar with; impressions, CPC, CPA, click-thru, visits, conversions, etc. We also talk about things like engagement, influence and authority as indicators of social media success. At what point do we ask people to actually buy something? Asking for the sale (via marketing) is not some shameful task only left to salespeople, its an organic element of the sales process that seems more awkward to omit than include. So much of the current social media approach feels to me like rewarding the salesperson for building rapport, but never closing the sale.
Flashback to the dot-com days when sites were all about "eyeballs" as the measure of success, but most had a hard time paying the bills with eyeballs. A great deal of the discussion and thinking around social media feels eerily similar to me but replace eyeballs with "influence", "conversation", "dialogue", "community", (insert social media buzzword of choice here).
Sales results are truly the ultimate ROI measurement for marketing, so ask yourself if you want the Cadillac, the steak knives or the other alternative? (This will make absolutely no sense to you if you aren't familiar with the movie, so watch the trailer link for this piece).
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