On Weds 22 April 2010 @roberrific and @geoffness sat in the back row of the downstairs gallery at The Spoke Club on King St W in Toronto, to attend the Toronto chapter of the American Marketing Association (or AMA) networking event.  Sponsored by Environics Analytics, three speakers were asked how to prove ROI in Social Media Marketing - is it even possible?

Twitter #SMROI

Laurie Dillon-Schalk made me fell extra welcome when I arrived as she announced to the staff that I was on her list.  Minutes later she presented me with 450 gram jar of mulberry jam. (Why?…it’s a long story that relates to a past Smojoe presentation in which I discussed my ‘Where are the Mulberry trees in Toronto?’ discussion forum thread on UrbanToronto .ca which I’m not even going to link to here because I’m sure I have already somewhere earlier on this blog) Laurie is the Chief Marketing Strategist at Social Wisdom and more than just a guest at this event, she was the moderator.

Laurie is a great speaker herself and she skillfully opened the event. She thanked AMA staff & volunteers, specifically, Christie, Layla, Jessica, Bruce and Brad, before she introduced the speakers.

Bryan Segal from ComScore

The first speaker was Bryan Segal from ComScore, a marketing research company that provides marketing data and services to companies that sell online. Bryan started by stating social media is not a fad (it is however rife with clichés).

He opened his presentation by asking for a show of hands on how many people used Facebook and Twitter and how many people blah blah surf porn. Ha ha I stopped putting up my hand after question three, but more so I could keep writing notes. Then in keeping with his classic ‘social media presentation’ model Bryan followed with a brief slide show of user adoption statistics. I’m not even going to write the stats here – such figures are meaningless and obsolete the minute they are published. Suffice to say that Canada as a nation is leading the social media adoption curve. In fairness to Bryan, who is a good charismatic speaker, this rather formulaic approach was indeed perfect for his presentation, as I believe his company records and crunches stats as a core business.

Bryan Segal talked about Social Search

One amazing idea that came out near the end of Bryan’s speech was his insights into the progress of social search, and the idea of being able to ask your friends questions and get answers on multiple platforms. Questions like ‘How many of my friends have XXX brand phone? Do they like it?’ This is indeed interesting…

Next up was Patrick Gladney of North Star Research Partners

Patrick started off by repeating the question in the title of the event ‘Is it possible to derive ROI from social media?’ and he said something very interesting – he reminded everyone in the room that radio and television advertising were also challenged the same way, in their origins. Patrick projected the words ‘social currency’ on screen and consequently I wrote those words down in my book. The next slide outlined his entire presentation in three sub headers, but it was only on screen for less than a minute, and I didn’t get time to write down the third point.
Measure against objectives
Advocacy has value
Okay there is a gap in my notes here – I had to go to the bathroom.

The third speaker was Steve Irvine from 8020 solutions

Steve Irvine started by referencing the earlier questions and asking two questions that he reckoned would help the networking. He asked ‘who here is looking for information?’ and then ‘who is in the business of giving information’ and then he instructed folks to look around and remember these people - those questions did indeed help networking

Steve launched a compelling idea by relating a famous Harry Potter blog marketing campaign story wherein one clever marketer saved the enterprise oodles of money and instead of creating big mass media vehicles with a rather synthetic message, they gave seven bloggers an intimate experience with rich information to leak across their networks. And somebody somewhere reckoned it reached 3.5 million fans in the first month. Good story.

Next was a slide ‘Right Person, Right Message, Right Time’ and this seems like a good approach. So now simply determining the right people, message and timing becomes the task. The next slide was of Steve’s own grandmother, and with her face smiling at us on screen he launched into a breakdown of the classic Tupperware parties. What a great social media networking analogy! The model is similar in some respects – invite people to the party, eliminate friend collectors from the potential buyers, and deliver a targeted message reinforcing the value of the product. And by the way Friend Collectors may not add ROI to the campaign, but they do raise awareness – next time, don’t invite them to the tea and sandwiches portion of the event.

The Speakers Answered the Following Questions

How to get B2B consumer statistics? What brand of tech software do you use to measure conversation? Should I use an avatar or my real name in social media campaigns? How does a corporation launch multi faceted social media campaigns? re: social media privacy issues…or something like that. How do you market social media to certain companies that don’t want to be left out, but don’t really want to be social? like erectile dysfunctions etc

The answers were as varied as the questions, and this final information dessert propelled a very fruitful networking session that lasted until 9pm and even later upstairs in the lounge.

Tags: 8020 solutions, Bryan Segal, ComScore, Geoff Whitlock, Laurie Dillon-Schalk, North Star Research Partners, Patrick Gladney, social currency, Social Wisdom, Steve Irvine, Tupperware parties

This entry was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2010 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Analytics Software, Social Media, Toronto, Web Marketing, workshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.