I like where Alinean is going with this article / white paper. When Goldman Sachs invests $450 Million in facebook and thinks it’s a $500 Billion company. When MySpace is laying off employees. When you see a lot of articles about how to manage your social media, then you have to question what is the value there. I personally think a $500 Billion valuation of facebook is too large. That’s why I like Alinean looking at the ROI of these things. Here’s a couple quotes from the article:
The Social Media Hierarchy of Needs includes:
- Tier 1: Content — Achieving social media ROI required a foundation of content, particularly focused on delivering value, presenting new ideas, improving credibility, driving personal connections and providing entertainment.
- Tier 2: Campaigns — Users won’t know that the content exists without campaigns, a promotional “push” of messages via the social media channels. Campaigns can include basic messaging like tweeting, updating status, posting discussions and links, and more advanced campaigns such as contests and sweepstakes.
- Tier 3: Monitoring — Above the campaigns, monitoring is required to actively listen to the user community. The monitoring can listen for campaign and content effectiveness, advocacy and customer intelligence, trends, competitive intelligence, incidents and issues, as well as responding to direct questions and incident response.
- Tier 4: Collaboration — Interacting with the user base is a key differentiating element to the most successful social media campaigns. This includes promoting and participating in collaborative discussions and engaging users in collaborative product reviews, shared designs and innovation, an initiative termed “collaborative innovation.”
Along with the hierarchical tiers, the research indicated two key additional supporting best practices, highlighting the importance of:
- Measurement of social media metrics, benefits and success; and a foundation of content, particularly focused on delivering value, presenting new ideas, improving credibility, driving personal connections and providing entertainment.
- Integration of information, such as lead nurturing and CRM, and processes, such as centralizing and coordinating governance and resources.
“In order to drive the most effective engagement, marketers need to implement each successive tier of the Social Media Hierarchy of Needs to drive the highest ROI from social media efforts,” adds Pisello.
You can also download the whitepaper for a more complete read.
