Mark Buckshon, of Construction Marketing Ideas, recently commented on a blog post from Matt Handal, of Help EveryBody Everyday:
In his Help EveryBody Everyday blog, Matt Handal tackles the question that should challenge AEC industry marketers: Does our investment in time and resources on social media really provide a return on investment?
Handal provides an indication that most marketers within this industry are having trouble tracking real business results from these initiatives. There may be tantalizing indicators, for example, increased web traffic and perhaps some anecdotal positive feedback, but can we track and assess whether these initiatives actually bring business to our organizations? (And you should not deceive yourself that social media is free even if you don’t write cheques or give credit card numbers to your industry providers — you still are investing time and energy and reallocating resources to handle the marketing initiatives.)
Handal notes:
Personal Strategy
Some people think that setting up a Facebook or Twitter account for your firm and posting self-serving information about your firm is a great use of social media investment. I’ve talked to many social media users in the construction industry about this tactic and I have yet to see anyone make or save a dime this way.I view Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter as personal tools to help you maintain relationships with people. For example, the time it would take me to “ping” 200 contacts via the phone and email would be significant. But using LinkedIn and Twitter’s status update feature, I can ping well over 200 contacts each week rather easily, Even if they don’t check the websites, they will get an email from Linkedin containing my status update.
However, except for the occasional Linkedin use, I do not believe my time is best used on Linkedin or Twitter when I am in the office. Therefore, the majority of my Linkedin and Twitter use is set up during my train ride and automated throughout the day and week. I can check what others are doing and responding to on the train home to keep our conversations going. The opportunity cost is just too high for me to dedicate any amount of time during the workday.
By identifying potential clients on Twitter, I have been able to develop relationships and bring in a small amount of revenue (in the tens of thousands, which for an $8M/year firm is a pittance). However, these relationships may provide more return as they need our services in the future. Therefore, I view my use of Twitter and LinkedIn as a positive return on my personal investment but not high enough to trump my other, more traditional, marketing activities.
In essence, Handal has come to a (potentially disturbing) conclusion: The only time where he gains value from social media “investment” value in place of traditional networking and communications approaches is when the time couldn’t be spent doing something better. (This is also echoed by this rather interesting blog posting from Ford Harding).
So is the social media effort worthwhile? In the past three years, I can track approximately $20,000 in actual revenue from this blog. The revenue “flow” is too inconsistent and chunky to provide meaningful trends — one big order skews the totals. This $20,000 is certainly useful but is the drop in the bucket in our overall revenue. Unfortunately, I am not able to directly track the results of social media initiatives from the company’s sales representatives outside of my orbit (the sales I count are the ones which originated directly with my blog and were forwarded to the representatives for follow-up or the small amount of direct advertising revenue here.)
Clearly, there are indications that other industries — where metrics and measuring are more prominent in assessing marketing strategies or where the typical client decision-maker is much younger than we will find in decision-making circles for AEC services — are seeing some interesting and positive results. Earlier this week, I reported on my retailer neighbour who loses testing and experimenting with social media because (a) it is cheap and (b) he already has systems in place to measure ROI so even small incremental improvements justify the research, effort and resources for the project.
Via: ConstructionMarketingIdeas.com
My opinion: depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. In business-to-consumer (B2C) environments, social media marketing has been shown to be very effective. In business-to-business (B2B), calculating ROI can be difficult, and this is especially true in the niche consulting realm that I work in within the AEC industry. When it comes to marketing consultant services, I subscribe to the Alan Weiss Contrarian Consulting school of thought. In his book, Million Dollar Consulting, Weiss describes in detail his concept of marketing gravity. I’m not as eloquent, but basically the idea is that for consultants to remain prosperous, they should be cultivating a pipeline of work and opportunity that is facilitated by leveraging a variety of both passive and active marketing techniques that serve to establish a presence. Weiss discusses book publishing, speaking engagements, print advertising as well as newer techniques including social media: blogging, LinkedIn, etc. It isn’t as relevant whether or not you get work from one particular medium because in truth, the combination of media has a synergistic effect. Somebody sees you speak at a conference, maybe later they see a blog post you authored, then they see you quoted in a magazine article; none of these on their own may compel someone to hire you (or your firm), but your proposal will be better received by someone that recognizes your name from said speech/post/quote.
In my opinion, mind share is more important for the consultant than market share. The conclusion that both Handal and Buckshon come to as far as social media marketing seems to be if you enjoy doing it, if it isn’t the only channel of communication, and “if you have a product or service where small incremental ‘yes’ decisions are possible,” then it is worth pursuing – at least for personal development. My opinion is that blogging, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. are just ways of communicating, and marketing is about communication.
I really don’t expect that a consulting firm will gain a new client because of 140 characters worth of solid gold ad copy, any more than I expect a consulting firm to land an unsolicited lucrative contract because of an ad in the yellow pages. The point is to make it easy for people to discover and learn more about you and what you have to offer. There are lots of ways to create marketing gravity to be perceived as a trusted advisor, many of which do not come with an easy calculation for ROI.
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