Lecture #3 (Part2) - The business of social media and making the ROI Case

Question 1: 

Let’s suppose your current annual sales are $1 million. You implement a social media strategy and begin generating $200,000 in revenue through your Facebook page. At the end of the year, your sales are till $1 million. Was your social media strategy successful? Why or why not. 

In my opinion, the social media strategy can not be concluded as not successful despite a new social media strategy has come into the picture. This is because there are other factors which at the same time will affect the sale revenue, hence the social media strategy cannot be conclusively said to be unsuccessful.

The sale revenue can be affected by the market conditions,  the existing of enter of new competitors, the existing of new substitute of products, the economy at the particular time. The social media strategy may be work well but the sale may be maintain or drops due to the other factors.

Question 2:

Every social media strategy costs money to implement, and we listed a few of those costs in this case study. Create more comprehensive list of social media strategy costs. Briefly describe each cost and indentify it as either a fixed cost or variable cost

 

Blog:

Launch a blog from the ground-up, outsource all content creation (including customer interaction) – $3,000-$6,000 a month (Fixed Cost)

Launch a blog from the ground-up, outsource all content creation at first, eventually take over – $3,000-$6,000 a month for 3-6 months (Fixed Cost)

Launch a blog from the ground-up, outsource some content creation till you can handle all – $2,500-$5,000 a month for 3-6 months(Fixed Cost)

Restructure an existing blog to improve your efforts – $3,000-$6,000 a month for 3-6 months (Variable Cost)

Limited coaching to improve your existing blogging efforts – $1,500-$4,000 a month for 3-6 months (Variable Cost)

Twitter

Launch a new presence on Twitter and outsource all content creation and customer interaction – $2,000-$5,000 a month (Fixed Cost)

Launch a new presence on Twitter and outsource all content creation at first, gradually taking over – $2,000-$5,000 a month for 3-6 months (Fixed Cost)

Restructure an existing Twitter presence to improve your efforts – $1,500-$4,000 a month for 3-6 months (Variable Cost)

Limited coaching to improve your existing efforts on Twitter – $1,500-$3,000 a month for 3-6 months (Variable Cost)

Facebook:

Launch a Facebook Fan Page from the ground-up, outsourcing all content creation and customer interactions – $3,000-$6,000 a month (Fixed Cost)

Launch a Facebook Fan Page from the ground-up, outsourcing most of the content creation at first, gradually taking on more – $3,000-$6,000 a month for 3-6 months (Fixed Cost)

Launch a Facebook Fan Page from the ground-up, outsourcing some content creation at first, till you can handle all – $2,500-$5,000 a month for 3-6 months.

Restructure an existing Facebook Fan Page to improve your existing efforts –$2,000-$4,000 a month for 3-6 months (Variable Cost)

Limited coaching on improving your Facebook Fan Page – $1,500-$3,000 a month for 3-6 months (Variable Cost)

Question 3:

Suppose you have a successful business with a well-liked product. One day something goes wrong and you ship 100,000 defective products. Almost the entirety of your customer base is disgruntled. What social media strategy would you employ to help? Why? Would you be better off just “waiting for it to blow over” or even sticking your head in the sand”?

The social media strategy can be adopted here is quick response to customer complaint through all available social media method and in the same time making full use of social media to build public relationship with   the customer.

In this case social media can be used as a tool to interact with customers who are affected with the defective products. The social media can answer all the queries posted by the customers and promptly give them a solution to rectify the problem.

In my opinion, it a not a good strategy to just "waiting for it to blow over" or " sticking your head in the sand" because it will not solve the problems but causes more anger from the customers for no responses.

Question 4:

In the case study, we listed five steps to success. Identify two others and briefly describe them.

  1. Add Tons of Value, Then Sell and Measure

For example, say a restaurant is rolling out a new healthy menu. Our goal is to get 400 customers into our restaurant to try the new menu over an upcoming weekend. Since our food is visually appealing, you develop a Facebook or Instagram strategy. We post pictures of your food, create content around the importance of healthy eating and curate information on your Facebook Page about farmers’ markets in our area.

Offer this valuable content to build trust with people. Then offer a coupon for the restaurant on our Facebook Page. The number of people who claim and redeem our coupon is a result you can quantify.

Here’s how to measure the efforts when using this strategy:

Use the tiered point system described in strategy to determine if the content is moving us closer to our goal. Use coupons that are specific to our social media campaign, thus making the return on our investment easy to track and measure.

Create unique landing pages for each of the campaigns where the customers can download or purchase what you are promoting. Since the landing page is used for one specific campaign, this will allow us to clearly see how successful our campaign is

2. Leverage a number of channels.

It’s one thing to tweet a few times a week, write a blog post once a month and update your profile on LinkedIn if we happen to land a new job. But it’s quite another to be active on a handful of social media channels on a daily basis.

That’s right, the most accomplished social media mavens don’t occasionally go online. They practically live online. Instead of checking email and voice mail, they’re responding to a steady, endless stream of comments, questions and requests from their friends, fans and followers.

Instead of sitting in meetings all day, they’re sitting in front of a variety of screens, tap, tap, tapping away in the name of meaningful engagement with their constituencies. Instead of working nine to five, they’re on call morning, noon and night, whenever they’re near their Blackberries, iPhones, laptops and notebooks. But it’s not just a matter of putting in all this time. To succeed in social media means to be active in more places than one.

Not every social media channel is for everyone. But let’s face it, if we are only using one or two of them, we are just barely scratching the surface..