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Posted on Nov 05, 2008 - 1:44am by John P. in Work
Jason Falls posted an article over on his blog Social Media Explorer a few days ago posing the question, “What is the ROI for Social Media?”
Jason’s overriding theme was presented early on in the article:
The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable.
He sat down with Katie Delahaye Paine and had a conversation regarding this topic.
This is why every session on measuring ROI in social media is a waste of time. None of the measurement experts are going to make that point and that point alone because without throwing page views and unique visitors and number of subscribers and sentiment and tone, they have nothing to offer.
I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with the entire premise of Jason’s post, mainly because I do not believe that the answer to this question can simply be “there really is no quantifiable ROI model”. That, to me, sounds like an excuse.
Sure, it’s hard to come up with a model – but that doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time. Indeed, there are many flaws in this statement.
As a C-level executive I’m going to tell you that you will never get any (real) budget to run social media programs without a hard and fast ROI model. And I would propose that talking a company into spending money without any framework for measuring ROI is both unfair and misleading. You simply cannot say “invest in this and have faith.” Faith is something you practice in church, not business.
Now, Kathy made some good points during the discussion, the most valid being that measuring ROI is an entirely individual exercise requiring different metrics to be counted, aggregated and analyzed. But neither Kathy or Jason proposed an actual framework for measuring the monetization of social media spend. And I believe that is what people need.
Social media is fun. I know that, you know that, we all know that. But at the end of the day you aren’t going to get money to play around. You get money to produce results that specifically translate to the bottom line. Let me know if any of you build a model. I’d love to see it…
Outstanding points, all. Thanks for continuing the discussion and offering the feedback on my thoughts and others. I think the key point lost in what I said is that the ROI I find difficult to prove is monetary. I can sell the soft returns (branding, messaging, reach, engagement, loyalty, etc.) and certain numbers can be wrapped around those benefits. But when a C-level manager with much less understanding or concern for the soft returns says, “Yeah, but how much money did I make from this investment?” I think we in the social media space A) Can’t definitively answer the question accurately and B) Need to work harder to find ways to do so.
Appreciate the points, push back and continued discussion.