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When Calculating Twitter's ROI, Don't Forget

Its Change on Organizations
Social Media Isn't Just a Marketing Tool but an Efficiency Driver

By Pete Blackshaw

Published: February 25, 2009

What's the bigger idea: social media as marketing stimulus or social media as a
way to innovate business processes?

Every brand manager or CMO should recognize that it's both -- and in a disruptive
economy, you need to take advantage of both outcomes. And when the potential
dividends of a marketing effort include changes to a company's process, we need
Pete to rethink the entire notion of ROI.
Blackshaw
This isn't an easy task, as marketers typically leave things such as organizational
strategy and technology implementation to other stakeholders -- keeping lines cleaner and allowing
marketers to focus on, well, their areas of focus. You let technology folks do technology, quality folks
do quality and service folks do service.

But social media softens the silos. It's hard to turn over a rock in social media, dip your toe into
Twitter or comment on someone's blog without rethinking the fundamentals of a firm's organization,
product development and even listening infrastructure. Such firsthand experience begets inspiration.
Inspiration powers change. And change is needed more than ever before as we're asked to contract our
resources.

Of course, I'm not just speaking for myself. A massive number of folks from the marketing
community not only talk about expanding communication opportunities, but also posit theories of
efficiency, organizational transformation and more holistic and integrated models of measuring
success and outcomes. And, OK, there's no shortage of oversized egos who romanticize the wisdom

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of the participatory plebs but, gosh darn it, there's enough content about how social media makes
processes better, faster and cheaper to make a six-sigma black belt salivate. Let's take this piece by
piece.

Social media and communication

Social media, at the end of the day, is about reinventing communication. Executed wisely, it's a new
covenant of interaction between consumer and consumers, and, more recently, consumers and
business. You could even argue that it's the long-overdue realization of one-to-one marketing that we
over-romanticized back in the 1990s and inexcusably put on the "direct marketing" shelf.

But "organizational" communication, across thousands of companies and

brands, is an area so bankrupt with inefficiency and scared of change ABOUT THE AUTHOR
that it's hard not to wonder whether your latest Twitter "aha moment" is Pete Blackshaw is exec VP of
better shared with the chief information officer or human resources than Nielsen Online Digital
Strategic Services and author
with the marketing team.
of 'Satisfied Customers Tell
Three Friends, Angry
Of course, in the age of social media, chief marketing officers need to
Customers Tell 3,000'
wear both hats. If anything, they must become more of like general (DoubleDay). His biweekly
managers. Shouldn't the rules of consumer "engagement" apply to how column looks at the
employees communicate? You get the idea. relationship between
marketing and customer
Driving innovation service in the age of consumer
Then there's innovation -- the engine of value creation and company control.
growth. Social media is one massive feedback loop. It's chaotic on the
surface, but unmistakably efficient if you consider the life cycle of vetting a good idea or absorbing
the ideas of others. If you really peel the onion on what's happening across blogs, Twitter and other
online communities, brands are setting up de facto listening labs that rewrite the rules of gathering
and managing feedback. We're getting more ideas faster. The funnel is broadening. The filters are
sharper, more immediate and grounded in deeper levels of intimacy with the product or proposition.

The end outcome, whether intentional or incidental, is a disintermediation of existing, and potentially
more expensive, processes. That alone should be reason enough for the CEO to personally initiate
"Social Media Day" or "CGM [consumer-generated media] Day."

Procter & Gamble's Kim Dedeker, speaking to the Advertising Research Foundation's recent
Listening Summit, suggested that brands need to reinvent "how to listen" not merely to figure out how
to turn on online strategy or social media, but far more importantly, to reinvent and "inspire" the
entire market research department. Put another way, listening is about reinvention.

The irony here is that a free tool known as Twitter was being used in real time by many of the
attendees, the resulting data streams inspiring new ideas and playback throughout the conference.

Joel Rubinson, chief research officer of the ARF, called it "an amazing record of our research
transformation conference, definitely more insightful than my old-school note taking. The big idea
was that listening creates a fast-learning organization, which is the only way marketing can catch up
to the consumer."

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Let's fixate for a moment on the word "inspiration." What's more critical in this down economy:
improving marketing effectiveness or inspiring the enterprise? Inspiration, of course. Inspiration
opens our trajectory of what's possible, compels us to do "irrational" things such as sending memos to
the CEO about what the organization must really do to regain competitive advantage. Inspiration is
empowering and enabling, not constraining or judgmental.

Driving margins, saving money

Let's end by hitting the sweet spot of practicality. At the end of the day, our foray into social media is
teaching us how to save money. Consumer-generated media and social-media-enabling tools allow us
to create websites and blogs for extremely low prices -- a far cry from the multimillion-dollar
websites we built when I was co-leading interactive marketing at P&G back in the 1990s. Brands
including Ford, Comcast, Toyota, Southwest, Sony, Denny's and others are testing new models of
customer service on platforms such as Twitter that, under the old "enterprise" rules, would have cost
millions to launch or even test. It's not that everything's cheap, but the barriers to low-cost earning
have plummeted.

Whether we as marketers admit it or not, our dips into the collective social-media learning lab are
making it really hard to justify $5,000-a-pop conference trips where we listen, learn, interact and
collect leads. One could easily argue that the collective, real-time wisdom of social media,
thoughtfully absorbed, easily substitutes for attending a "live" conference. And online video makes
the substitution all the more tolerable. Video is a process innovation that is rewriting all the rules of
efficiency.

Across the social-media airways there's no shortage of inspired thinking about what's possible. At a
time when organizations are under intense pressure to reinvent themselves -- to take lemons and make
lemonade -- it might be the right time to focus our efforts, even for a moment, on the overall "business
process" equation. That's probably the easiest and most obvious way to demonstrate ROI around all of
these efforts.

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