Has your company spent seemingly countless hours tweeting on Twitter, networking on Facebook and writing the company blog? Have you found yourself wondering if it’s all a waste of time? Maybe that last Facebook fan page contest saw fewer entries than you’d hoped for, or that last Twitter-only coupon had fewer redemptions than you’d expected, but perhaps that’s not all that matters.

According to the the latest report by analyst firm Forrester, many people are looking at the face-value dollars and cents of social media marketing and, put simply, they’re doing it wrong. Beyond clicks and coupon redemptions there lies a case for social media marketing that shows its value is well beyond what we see on the surface.

Analyst and report author Augie Ray writes in a blog post this morning that traditional measurements of success for return on investment in social media marketing lead to an incomplete picture.

This morning I received an email from a reader linking to an article from Ducati, the famous motorcycle company, about why they decided to remove their Corporate Blog and replace it with a Facebook Page. In the article they highlight the various reasons that they decided to make the shift. While they may have justified the shift and think it was a smart idea, in reality they just shot themselves in the foot … here’s why.

Corporate blogs are good for a number of reasons, most importantly search engine optimization. While a company may not have resources for company blogs, any large corporation can easily put aside the budget for one … it really isn’t that expensive. The primary reason to keep the blog is that gaining fans on your Facebook Page is a conversion game. While fans will come through Facebook, and you can pay for Facebook ads, the user acquisition cost via a blog should be comparable to the cost of acquiring fans directly from Facebook.

Any effective social media marketing strategy involves multiple channels. Yes, Facebook should be one of your company’s primary marketing channels, however killing all other channels and replacing them exclusively with Facebook is not only a bad marketing gimmick but it’s also a great way to kill off your other channels of new Facebook fan acquisition. By embedding your Facebook fan box on your website (as we have done on this website’s sidebar), you can dramatically increase your Facebook fan base.

Combined with search engine optimization, your blog could become the largest source of new Facebook fans. So word to the wise, if you are considering killing your company blog, think twice about it because you may just be killing one of your greatest potential channels for acquiring new Facebook fans.

Thanks, Kelly! Nice catch…

Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream of Vermont announced in an email to their subscribers last week that they will be discontinuing their regular email marketing campaigns, in favor of social media. This was a major surprise – Usually, I think of social media and email marketing as having a close relationship and that they are most effective when used together. However, Ben & Jerry’s clearly feels otherwise and that their customers prefer contact through social media sites to email in their inbox. In their last email message, they invited their subscribers to connect with them via their Facebook or Twitter accounts, and this would be the last email they would receive from the famous ice cream brand.

Since this announcement, internet marketers and marketing blogs have been buzzing with the news. This is the first major corporation to completely discontinue email marketing, a mainstay of internet marketing since the 90’s, for other internet channels. Ben & Jerry’s customers had indicated that they disliked the email despite loving the brand, which means that it wasn’t building the positive relationship that the famously brand-conscious ice cream company wanted.

Why is this working for them so well? Their presence in social media was already well established, and their fans wanted to continue the connection beyond the email. Their Facebook and Twitter profiles are already delivering tremendous value to them, and so it was easy for them to expand the energy behind those accounts. Their Facebook Page has over 1.3 million fans as of the time of writing, and they maintain several Twitter profiles (Such as @CherryGarcia and @ BenJerrysTruck) with many thousands of followers each.

Embracing social media should not mean organizational change, it should change the organization. I now take the organization’s current strategic plan, CEO’s vision, mission statement and make those the metrics of a social media strategy. If a non-profit has a strategic objective to “further engage current donors”, with 600 million people on Facebook it is a sure bet that some of them have a profile. No new metrics, measures or key indicators – we have simply created an additional platform from which to further engage stakeholders in our work and achieve existing goals.

Social media exists and organizations are in it whether they choose to be or not. For non-profits, we are seeing a shift – not only are we working to find donors/members, they are finding us…through social media. It is a slow moving shift, however it is a juggernaut and unstoppable. I recently heard a poignant expression, “you are your Google results”. Truer words could not be spoken and your results may be reflecting a message that is contrary to your organization’s mission and self-image. Those results will not change without a concerted effort to engage in social media. Throughout life it drives us crazy when people talk about us when we’re not around – here we have an opportunity to be present. Why ignore it?

Leaders may believe that if they don’t play, they cannot lose. Losing in social media can be akin to the experiences of companies like Kraft, Nestle, and BP in the social media realm. At the very least those companies are engaged in the conversation and have a strong awareness of the perceptions of their brand. On occasion, each has even taken action related to the “conversations”. As a leader, I prefer to have as many listening posts as possible in regard to my organization and those I serve and hope to serve.

Follow the ‘via’ link to go to the source…

Too little too late. If you really want to experience social media integration with Outlook, use the Gist plugin for Outlook — it will give you all this and more…