Ryan Anderson dot ca

I talk to a lot of brand managers and marketers about their online campaigns and the goals that they’re trying to achieve. At the end of the day, clients are looking for one thing when they hire an agency – increased revenue. True – community and connection have external rewards for both brands and the community it serves, but the end goal is always the same… this is business, after all.

When I bring up social media with them, I get one of three responses. Either they fully understand the value of community, have not considered it but are open to the idea, or they believe that community, content creation and “joining the conversation” are notions that fall outside the realities of marketing.

For some reason, the third group is most often made up of the marketing set. Their reason, when I prod a bit, is that their job isn’t to create community or become a broadcaster – their job is to create leads, measurable impressions, drive sales.  I can understand this feeling – as I said, it is their job as marketers to create more revenue, and transaction is measureable, therefore a marketer who needs to justify his or her existence to a CEO or CMO can point to a transaction and say “Look what I did.”  In most cases, if they create a lead that doesn’t turn into a sale, the blame lies outside of the marketing department and has to be sucked up by bizdev.

These are the marketers who eschew blogs for mailing lists, social networking for advertising and focus their marketing plans around creating quantifiable transactions rather than creating a vibrant and evangelical community.

The problem is that the buying process for most purchases is much more complicated than lead, opportunity, close.  When consumers have unlimited choice at their fingertips, there are hundreds of factors that will affect intent to purchase.  Landing pages may convince people to enter their email for more information, but will they increase trust?  Will they convince me to tell my friends about a great service?  Probably not.

Social Media can sometimes be a hard sell because most of the time, it’s not easily measured on a transaction basis.  On top of that, it’s not about selling so much as it’s about educating and showing, which is very hard to swallow for a hyper-competitive sales-focused Marketing Director.  In the end, however, a strong social media campaign executed for the right type of client strengthens reputation, trust, evangelism and a company’s listening power – all of which are incredibly important to reaching the almighty sale.

Transaction is important – there is no question about that – but ignoring the importance and power of community because it can’t be measured as easily strikes me as completely crazy.  As social media people, it’s our job to educate client on how that grey area between community and sales actually works, but in order to do so, we have to understand it ourselves and accept that we may have to explain it with numbers to some clients.  This is difficult, as social media is uncontrolled and deals in the realm of reality rather than metrics, but it’s not impossible.  The key is understanding the marketing landscape for each client and showing them how community can move the numbers that they need to move.