ROI – marketing briefings.

Econsultancy recently covered an announcement by Dutch airline KLM that they generate 25 million euros per year off of their social media activity. This is a very significant amount of money to be made off of social media efforts. Although social media is very clearly an extraordinarily popular means of communicating with clients and potential customers, experts and the like are still measuring how exactly to determine ROI off of social media and social media marketing companies are still struggling to actually make money.

Still, a quick perusal of KLM’s social media and it’s not overly surprising that they’re finding ways to make money off of it. Take Twitter for example: browse their tweets and you’ll see numerous promotions, videos, and photos for people to interact with. Browse through their tweets and replies and you’ll see a plethora of responses. The company is consistently responding to people who inquire, even negatively, and in 11 languages.

Even more impressive, their Twitter profile cover photo is updated every 5 minutes and features the estimated response time. It’s like being at the DMV, except it doesn’t suck and they can only respond in 140 character or less.

KLM updates their Twitter photo every 5 minutes to update followers. Source: Econsultancy.

The company states that it learned how to effectively use its social media during times of trouble:

“Recounting the story of KLM’s social origins, Vogel-Meijer said that in 2010 the company learned a lesson by responding quickly when flights over Europe were banned due to the Icelandic ash cloud.

Previously the company had only been using social to push out standard marketing messages, however thousands of questions began pouring in on Facebook and Twitter as all other service channels were busy.

Faced with the dilemma of either responding to the queries or ignoring them all, KLM opted for the former.

It did so without waiting to form a proper strategy, but responded to the situation as it developed.

That was the start KLM’s social strategy and remains the basis of its success.”

Put simply, KLM sees success in its social media because it follows some of the most basic principles of social media that many companies consistently fail to follow:

It doesn’t just advertise. Amongst advertisements are valuable promotions and cool content previously curated.
They respond and engage. If you tweet KLM, they will tweet you back. Plus, they adapt to the person speaking to them and they sound human.
They monitor their social channels. They soon began to find that many of their customers and social followers wanted forms of “social payments.” Now, you can pay online over Facebook and Twitter. And they claim to be making 80,000 euros a week doing it.

I guess it goes to show that if you properly engage your audience and make your company accessible and human online, profits can follow – especially if customers specifically ask to be able to pay over your social media channels, like KLM customers did.

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.

Sound Off: Do you think social media jobs will continue to remain prevalent in the coming years? How should firms measure the ROI of social media? Tweet me at @aclavers.