Social Media ROI

This week I have been working with a new client on their social media strategy. More about them in future posts, but even though they are an educational non-profit, they are interested in their return on investment (ROI) from using social media.

Businesses have learned in the past five years that social networking is a powerful platform. Their market research shows that their customers are using social media and that it affects their buying. The problem has been showing the ROI from companies getting into the space. How does adding another 25,000 followers on twitter or Facebook impact sales? More importantly, DOES it impact sales at all? 

In phase one of the social media explosion, companies didn't really see why they needed to be in the space. It looked like a fad. In phase two, they saw their competitors moving into the space and figured they had better be there too or be seen as old-fashioned. In this phase there was (and still is for some companies) an “If we build it, they will come" attitude. But then they didn't come. Or the company wasn't sure if they had come because of the social media.

Once MySpace was big. Then Facebook overwhelmed it. Now, MySpace is trying to swim back up to the surface. They need to show people that they are something other than Facebook, not a replacement for it. Google Plus took that attitude too, saying "We're not Facebook and we don't want to be." Critics might say that's because neither of them can be Facebook at this point. Supporters would say that there is room for other networks as long as they serve different needs.

Yahoo was once Google, in that it was the place to search. But that was before google became Google. Now, with CEO Marissa Mayer calling the shots, they are looking at purchases like Tumblr which would add 107 million microblogs and another 15 billion pageviews a month to Yahoo. For companies like Yahoo, Google and Facebook (who are media and advertising companies now), that means a lot to ROI. But Yahoo is also looking at being cool again.   The marketing folks will look at the numbers and see that users stay longer on Tumblr than on Facebook and get excited. They will tell you that Yahoo users are an aging audience. That's not good for advertisers. It was said that Tumblr would cost a billion dollars. Facebook bought Instagram last year for about $715 million. Not chump change, so you better get some ROI from that.

Then there is the ROI of your personal social media. What do you get from being on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn? Connecting with old friends, keeping up with casual acquaintances, finding out what people are talking about, making professional connections, self-promotion, jobs, staying up on new things, trends, and just trying to stay cool as you age? 

I use a site called SlideShare to post presentations that I create and give. It's a way to archive them, share them (via links and embeds) with people at an event and with people who didn't attend the event, and it has social tools so that people can follow your work and you can follow people who interest you. There is a lot of backslapping and hat tipping in social media. You show me yours and I'll show you mine.

Slideshare sends me weekly stats about my uploads. It tells me that my slides have had 133,00 views. 150 have favorited them and 1000 people have downloaded them.  Several presentations on Moodle (that are now out of date) keep getting views and are up to almost 60,000. One on open textbooks had 40 views this past week added to its 2000 earlier ones. My most recent upload on engagement has almost 400 views. The site links to my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and I get followers and make contacts by way of those presentations.

So what is my return on this little social investment? As with companies, it's about building reputation, community and attention. Those are tough things to put a $ on, even though we know thay have value that is at least partially monetary.




Readings in Social Media 2013

smThis will be the fourth summer that I will teach my graduate class in designing social media. Every year, I have asked online for suggestions of book (not usually "textbooks") for the class which is part of the MS in Professional and Technical Communication at NJIT. Students in the PTC program tend to be (or intend to be) designers, technical writers, media & social media managers, but I always get a few students from the management, communications, media, IT and design majors.

The course examines how organizations use social media as communication tools for marketing, education & training and community building and students do social media surveys and create strategy proposals for actual organizations.

Though the bulk of the daily, short readings are current and available online, I also ask each student to select an outside book that focuses on an area of interest to their goals. they share content from that book when appropriate into the discussions online so that the class gets content from a number of other books.

Making the reading selection process itself a social media project seems appropriate. Books and readings in social media go out of date so quickly that it seems foolish to rely on a traditional textbook.

I am also a proponent of Open Educational Resources, especially open textbooks. Having put two sons through college not so long ago, I am also very cognizant of the cost of textbooks. There are lots of open texts (again, textbook may be a misnomer) and I try to use those when possible.

As general texts for the class, I will include three texts that are available free online. These three are not strictly about social media, but each contains ideas that I find provocative to the discussion. I will point students to specific chapters or sections and I feel a lot better about doing that knowing that there will be no cost to them.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler has made the entire book and additional materials available for free download at cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation, by Jono Bacon [free PDF download]

Jonathan Zittrain's book, The Future of the Internet - and how to stop it is also a free pdf download under a Creative Commons license.


Outside Reading Book Suggestions for DESIGNING FOR SOCIAL MEDIA
The first section of the list below includes books I have read and found useful and that students have used. The second section includes titles suggested by readers of this blog, colleagues and titles found, read and recommended by my students in past years. You'll notice that many of the titles are not specifically on social media or are on some area within social media (such as marketing or design).


If you would like to suggest a book related to an aspect of social media, please do so by adding a comment below.


  1. Virtual Communities- Felicia Wu Song  "Does contemporary Internet technology strengthen civic engagement and democratic practice? This book seeks to understand the technology on its own terms, focusing on how the technological and organizational configurations of online communities frame our contemporary beliefs and assumptions about community and the individual. It analyzes key structural features of thirty award-winning online community websites."

  2. Designing mLearning: Tapping into the Mobile Revolution for Organizational Performanceby Clark Quinn is being used this summer in NJIT's PTC 650 - ELEARNING DESIGN FOR MOBILE

  3. What Would Google Do?: Reverse-Engineering the Fastest Growing Company in the History of the World by Jeff Jarvis and also his second book, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live

  4. Power Friending - Amber MacArthur

  5. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations - Clay Shirky

  6. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies - Charlene Li

  7. Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations - Amy Shuen

  8. Designing for the Social Web - Joshua Porter

  9. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future - S. Craig Watkins

  10. Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone - patterns, principles, and best practices for starting a social website - has more of a design focus rather than current trends (so it might be relevant longer).

  11. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. - Mitch Joel - a business focus on using Net marketing, esp. free tools and services

  12. Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee ~ Web 2.0 for the enterprise

  13. The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein - using twitter in a personal or company context

  14. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr

  15. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, by Sherry Turkle

  16. Virtual Communities (Digital Formations) by Felicia Wu Song

  17. The Social Media Handbook: Rules, Policies, and Best Practices to Successfully Manage Your Organization's Social Media Presence, Posts, and Potential - Nancy Flynn

  18. There is another book similarly titled The Social Media Management Handbook (subbtitled "Everything You Need To Know To Get Social Media Working In Your Business")

  19. also several other social media handbooks specific to different areas

  20. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation - Tim Brown

  21. The Cluetrain Manifesto - though ten years old, the authors' 95 theses about the networked marketplace probably make more sense today. Observations about business in America and how the Internet will continue to change it.

  22. Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site -  by Gavin Bell

  23. The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success - Safko

  24. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins.  This book puts web 2.0 technologies and trends into a much larger historical context of participatory culture. 


  25. The following titles are ones that I have not read, but that have been recommended by my students and others.


  26. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green

  27. Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (and Other

    Social Networks) by Dave Kerpen  I am very interested in the art/science of creating content that grabs large audiences. I chose this book because it focuses on creating content as well as how to retain your audience and keep them engaged with your brand. I may also have been taken in by the Facebook thumbs up on the front cover, telling my subconscious that this was the book to buy.

  28. The Social Media Strategist: Build a Successful Program from the Inside Out - Christopher Barger

  29. The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar by Generating Leads with Blogging, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and More by

    Kip Bodnar and Jeffrey Cohen.

  30. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future by S. Craig

    Watkins  Unlike the other books that have been posted about so far, the book I chose is not really about marketing with social media. It is more

    about the culture of social media and people’s use of it, specifically users in their late teens and early twenties. The author interviewed a number of young people about the ways that they use social media and their feelings and attitudes towards it.

  31. Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel

  32. Socialnomics by Erik Qualman.

  33. The Science of Marketing: When to Tweet, What to Post, How to Blog, and Other Proven Strategies by Dan Zarrella - a scientific approach to the way businesses and brands approach marketing. It uses a combination of marketing, statistical, and psychological research to explain why and, more importantly, how, companies should adapt marketing strategies such as blogging, social media, email marketing, and webinars.

  34. Ken Auletta - Googled: The End of the World as We Know It

  35. Shel Israel- Twitterville

  36. Chris Brogan and Julian Smith Trust Agents

  37. The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging

  38. David Meerman Scott - New Rules of Marketing & PR

  39. Paul Gillin - The New Influencers

  40. Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge - Putting the Public Back in Public Relations

  41. David Kirkpatrick - The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that's Connecting the World

  42. Bob Garfield - Chaos Scenario

  43. David Meerman Scott - World Wide Rave

  44. The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business - "whuffie" is Hunt's word for social capital on the Web

  45. Virtual Communities: Bowling Alone, Online Together by Felicia Wu Song

  46. On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders - Michael A. Banks

  47. I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy - Lori Andrews

  48. Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices - Christopher Locke

  49. The Social Media Business Equation: Using Online Connections to Grow Your Bottom Line - Eve Mayer Orsburn

  50. Return on Relationship - Ted Rubin and Kathryn Rose

  51. Navigating Social Media Legal Risks: Safeguarding your Business - Robert McHale

  52. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture - Jean Burgess, Joshua Green, Henry Jenkins, and John Hartley

  53. Wide Open Privacy: Strategies for the Digital Life - J.R. Smith and Siobhan MacDermott

  54. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age - Manuel Castells



Microsoft Want You to Get Socl

logoLast December, Microsoft opened up registration for its own social network Socl http://www.so.cl to users with Microsoft and Facebook accounts. They had beta tested it with Microsoft employees and college students before that. As social networks go, it's more Pinterest than Facebook or Google+. The landing pages are photo collages.

Will it compete with Facebook? I don't think it was designed to compete. It comes from Microsoft Research FUSE Labs. I read that their research was in social search with students and more related to learning. I don't see how that research led to Socl which seems to a service where people connect/follow others over shared interests via image collages. In other words, it's Pinterest.

I could mock Microsoft for that but on their own Socl "About" page, they say that Socl is not designed to compete with the established social networks. They describe it as an “experimental research project with a minimal set of features.”

One of those features is “parties” which lets groups participate in online "video viewing parties." It's no Google+ Hangouts but I do see a similar strategy with Socl to what Google is doing with Plus. Both companies are trying to create a cross-platform ecosystem where all the parts are connected. Google has had some success with that. Some. Can Microsoft connect their mail, Bing, Socl etc. across hardware (Surface tablets) and software (Windows 8)?


Siri, what is semantic search?

Big Bang Theory's Raj meets his dream voice-activated "personal assistant", Siri


I keep reading bits and pieces about Google using semantic search technology. It's a way that they plan to answer user questions rather than simply hunt down words. For quite awhile I had read about this being the next big thing in search engine functionality. I'm no expert on search technology but it seems that most of the searching we now do is semantic.

We have become used to seeing our search results as list of blue links. That's how it has been since the beginning. But you are probably noticing more things on the top of that results page. The promise of semantic search is to improve search accuracy by understanding our intent and also the contextual meaning of the terms we search.

Although Apple's Siri has both fans and critics, the potential is pretty exciting. It can support natural language now and it will get better at semantic search in the future. Instead of just using a keyword-based search, we can ask a question. Instead of "restaurant, Italian and a city", you ask "Where's a good place to get Italian food nearby?" Is that question really so much easier than the keyword search? Well, Siri. Alexa or Google or the next big thing in search will know where you are located already (via GPS or your IP address) and it will also know that we have been to other restaurants in the area. And if we have entered some social data, like reviews of those restaurants, it will be able to suggest somewhere to eat that fits out personal little algorithm.

At least that's is the plan.

It was a year ago that I read an article about Google's semantic search algorithm. and since making it work requires vast amounts of data, Google seems like the one to do it.

I have also read that "true" semantic search uses an "inference engine" which means that - like a good human reader - instead of just recognizing words, it draws on its own "knowledge" to reach a conclusion.  Hello, ontology!

Something else that needs to happen is that users need to change our searching habits. We will have to move from basic keywords that result in thousands of results, to clearer queries that recognize the capabilities of the engine. We are not at the point where you can ask "What would I like for dinner tonight?" and expect an answer.