ROI

Last weekend I had an interesting experience.  On Friday and in part Saturday I participated in the International Marketing Congress in Ghent.  On Monday, I was at TEDxBrussels, which by now has become the biggest TEDx in the world.  The two events couldn’t have been more different.

If you asked the average businessperson “who are your best customers?” the initial response is likely to be “those who spend the most money with my company” or maybe “those who are the most profitable to us”.

Later this month I’m the keynote speaker at the Dutch Marketing Conference Digitaal willen we allemaal in Utrecht. I’m speaking about the danger of building your social media strategy on tactics (“We need to use Twitter” or “We need to use Facebook”) rather than focusing on ongoing and sustainable engagement. Long-term success comes from a strategic (not tactical) approach to social media and from properly evaluating why you are using social media in the first place and how you will measure its success against overall business objectives as well as any individual campaign aims that you might be focused on at any given time.

Looks like China is getting it when it comes to design.

In a recent interview on the local Chinese CCTV, Chen Dongliang, Director of the Beijing Industrial Design Center, has highlighted the tremendous economic value of Industrial Design to China’s economy.

These charts were constructed using ZenithOptimedia’s ROI Tracker - a consumer research-based tool that measures and helps plan marketing activities across the range of brand contact touchpoints.

The last post of our guide to Getting Started in Social Media looked at measurements and how brands should be ruthless about ROI. This presentation from Oliver Blanchard is a great introduction to social media ROI and how you should conceive of it and then measure it. It’s also quite amusing in parts and so is Required Reading this week at FreshNetworks

important notice: this is the unabridged version of a post published at Bnet.co.uk

One is often told that getting the buy-in for a Social Media initiative requires some solid ROI calculation. One would have to weigh the pros and cons, how much it costs, try and evaluate the effort which is required, measure it and translate it into pounds, shillings and pence. And profit should also come into play, since it is deemed inappropriate for a new project to be set up without a clear definition of how much revenue it brings.

by: Yann Gourvennec

note: this is an unabridged version of my article published on Bnet.co.uk

All customers are created equal. Yeah, right. And the cow really did jump over the moon.

Customers come in all colors and sizes – and revenue and profit levels.