- Posts tagged Social Media ROI
- Explore Social Media ROI on posterous
Best Buy Prediction Market Videos
“Big companies are like communist countries – we all know how well communist countries worked. At some point they fell apart, not because the leaders were dumb, but because nobody would tell the leaders at the top, who had to make decisions, what decisions to make.”
Jeff Severts, EVP, Best Buy
Think of the possibilities! Tapping into the wisdom of the crowd is the new way of predicting future outcomes.
On Great Websites, Information is Craft, not Commodity
The same principle applies to the websites that are distinctive because their authors combine content and packaging into a beautiful product that others aspire to recreate. Mega-sites like Facebook, Yahoo!, CNN, and many others designed to keep you moving through content like merchandise racks in a department store will never define the web, because they don’t push it forward. They have the biggest, brightest signs, but can’t match the experience and quality of sites that are the product of craftsmanship and dedication.
New Hype (Cycle) from Gartner: Prediction Markets on the Rise | Prediction Markets Blog
Gartner has released their Hype Cycle for Social Software, 2010 report. We agree that the interest and meaningful use of prediction markets are on the rise. In addition, Sherrilynne Starkie has an excellent summary of the identified trends.
She identifies two of our strengths in trends on the rise:
Idea Marketplaces: enable organisations to source innovative ideas, technologies, products and services by connecting them to innovators and solution providers from around the world.
Social Analytics: the process of measuring, analysing and interpreting the results of interactions between brands and consumers and/or businesses across digital channels in the context of specific goals and objectives.
Sliding into Gartner’s infamous Trough of Disillusionment, though, are prediction markets, sandwiched in between mobile social networks (aka Facebook) and unified communications (aka IP telephony and video conferencing):
Prediction Markets: are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. Assets are created whose final cash value is tied to a particular event (e.g., will the next US president be a Republican) or parameter (e.g., total sales next quarter). The current market prices can then be interpreted as predictions of the probability of the event or the expected value of the parameter. Prediction markets are thus structured as betting exchanges, without any risk for the bookmaker.
Social media: short-term success versus sustainability | Econsultancy
While it is too early to measure the impact of the Old Spice campaign over the long term, for instance, it seems pretty clear: this is a campaign that will eventually fizzle out. The setup probably is not sustainable, and in any case, it seems quite likely the initial hoopla will die down and we'll all become a lot interested in watching the Old Spice guy's videos. In other words, his shtick will wear off. Yes, there may very well be ways to extend the core concept and themes, but Old Spice is not going to see continued month-over-month sales increases of over 100%.
Perhaps it doesn't need to. There's a good argument to be made that shooting for sustainable performance of any one campaign is a fool's errand in the realm of social media. But on the flip-side, there are a number of challenges for marketers looking to string together a series of one-hit wonders:
- Most people don't win the lottery twice. Old Spice, for instance, is probably not going to be able to immediately follow up its 'Smell Like A Man, Man' campaign with a campaign of equal or greater impact.
- Short term results don't a long term business make. While few marketers will complain about short-term sales spikes, they're not necessarily as beneficial to a business as marketers would like to believe. In some cases, they can even be detrimental because they fool a company into making long-term decisions based on short-term results. This is especially true for marketers pushing newer products and services with less brand recognition.
- A hit or miss mentality can be tough to maintain. The idea that you can 'fail early and often to succeed quicker' is nice in theory, but it can be somewhat problematic too. After all, if your strategy is to run lots of campaigns and hope that a few succeed wildly, a low percentage of successes may be more discouraging than encouraging.
At the end of the day, I don't think there's a good answer here. Although social media has certainly matured to the point where it's no longer okay to say "this is so new let's not worry about ROI", there's still a lot to be learned about how social media is best applied to produce said ROI. That means marketers should probably worry first and foremost about finding ROI, and then they can worry about if and how to sustain it.
