Last night the good folks at Rackspace invited me to sit on a panel at an event they held at the New York Stock Exchange for some of their agency clients of which Firstborn is one. The discussion focused on social media and Twitter in particular and I was asked towards the end of the evening whether I thought these networks could be monetized by companies. It got me thinking about a wonderful tweet I read the other day by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos who I follow on Twitter.
Twittering is like hugging. Just because it's hard to measure the return on investment doesn't mean there isn't value there.
That statement struck a chord with me since the work that we do at Firstborn largely has to do with user engagement rather than raw commerce. Sure, the projects we create are implemented with detailed metrics and we're able to see incredibly large amount of time spent which is one indicator of success but is this enough? Getting back to Tony's quote, I think it's going to require a change in mind set of marketers about how they measure ROI and be comfortable about other bench marks that add to brand equity. After all, will Twitter be ever used to directly sell products or services in an e-commerce model? Probably not. So we should all get used to the fact that the social media are more of an indirect sales tool whose monetization must be thought of in new ways.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment