A recent article published on Forbes asked a couple of key questions regarding social media and digital marketing efforts within corporations:
- Are companies bored with social media?
- Is there a backlash against social media within many companies?
Photo from http://terezalitsa.blogspot.ca/2013/09/is-it-time-to-unplug-from-social-media.html. Original artwork credit unknown.
Depending on how you look at things, author David Amerland says that it could be true. There is some evidence that many companies across America are laying off some social media employees. A key motivator behind skepticism of social media marketing, citing a McKinsey study in the article, is the difficulty in which the ROI of digital efforts can be measured. Simply put, the effectiveness of a Tweet cannot be translated as easily into dollars and cents as a traditional advertising campaign or a traditional direct sales push.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people in sales roles in 2012 was virtually unchanged with that compared to a pre-Web 1992. And that’s without even taking into account the trend for changing traditional titles into “Associates” or “Service Directors.” -Forbes, Amerland
Personally, I have to admit my skepticism of social media as a career. Without a doubt, I think social media is a very important aspect of marketing and customer service these days. However, year after year, more and more young people are entering into the workforce with an almost natural ability to understand social media trends and learn social media marketing at a fast rate. I think this raises the question of whether or not we’re going to need specific people within our marketing departments to handle the execution of our social media, or if any marketing/communications generalist will be able to handle social media within a few years time? Why would companies continue to create more salaried positions if the duties could be merged with the work of another new hire? Combined with this, the difficulty of measuring ROI is a very important pitfall of social media marketing endeavours. Without a doubt, many individuals in corporate executive roles are still of the older generation. This is a generation that learned to measure much of business success on dollar figures. More efforts will likely need to be made in order to make social media an obviously profitable marketing stream. The link to ROI is not as clear with social media as it is with direct sales. In order to measure this, much attention will need to be paid to tying in business goals with social media efforts, as well as assigning proper analytics in order to track the progress. HootSuite (an obvious advocate of social media) presented a short blog post on a handful of ways businesses can measure the ROI of social media.
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