Love this Tyler. It sounds like we’ve both come full circle… I just saw your post on “why you don’t Twitter” and the follow up to that. Social media didn’t impress me much at first but I started seeing how other churches and ministries were using it to connect with people and I started to get excited about it. Love that quote: “The only thing that will bring zero results is doing nothing.”

I think if we turn social media into a strategy we will find somewhere else to congregate.
Thats what makes social media so great, you are interacting with people.

All good points sir, and quite true…but I do want to remind you that you attending a *marketing* conference. Shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that most of the talk was around strategy and monetization

Yeah absolutely and I knew that going in. I still wish there was more talk about how businesses could better their relationships with customers through social media.

I hope you can make it to Blogworld Expo later in the year, there is A LOT of content there, multiple days, tons of panels and presos, and no doubt much of it will cover that subject. I’m personally passionate about that very thing, so I hope we’ll hear more about it as time goes on.

I enjoyed parts of the day…for me it was a lot recycling of information i was already aware of. But I got to see a lot of people who i knew from the interwebs. For me, social media is about people and how we convey and communicate on the web. Great to connect with Josh Groth…

I agree, Tyler. Ironically I was on a panel of “The ROI of Community Building” and it seemed everyone in the audience wanted to talk about money, ROI, etc. Where I wanted to talk about building relationships and how relationshiops can’t necessarily have a dollar amount put on them! I think there should have been more of an emphasis on *community building* in that panel.
You sneak that ROI into any title and people are going to want to see numbers. Bummerooski.

Looks like I missed meeting you in person – I wish the conference would have had more networking opportunities. I felt like I was sitting and listening more than connecting. Hopefully we’ll get to meet each other again soon!

-Jeanna Barrett
Whrrl Community Manager

Thanks Jeanna, glad to hear I wasn’t the only one hoping for more relational emphasis.

Tyler, I keep coming away from events seeing that it is about the people; the ones I have already met and the ones I have not. Yes I learn more about metrics and the other R word I don’t want to say, but for me the value is in meeting in person folks like you, Matt, Neenz and Megan Strand who I have connected with for a long time on the web. Something changes when we meet in person. I try to convert as many relationships to what a good friend calls meat space. Something transcends. Not every relationship turns out to be what we hoped for, but many are now my best friends and collegues. Enough said.
Nice post

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I think that speaking about the value of creating strong relationships is fine, but for me, it seems totally reasonable for a business person to ask – “why? how does this benefit my business?”

To be clear, I think there is too much emphasis on DR style ROI, but marketing, advertising, brand building, community building, any of it, to the extent that it’s deemed to be an important aspect of business, should be able to point to business results.

I spend a fair amount of time working with my clients to move them both up and down this chain of logic. From the bottom, it’s often getting people think more long-term than DR style results, getting them to think about how we’d work to improve their brand-lift, and what that would mean for their business. On the other end, I spend the rest of my time talking clients down from “I need to engage with my community!” Really? Why do you need to engage, what will happen if you’re engaged? How much time will you spend developing that, and what do you hope to get out of it?

I do this not to rain on any ones parade, but rather, help show in more definitive way that the things I care about: design, customer experience, etc. ARE important to the financial success of a business.

So any way, it’s all a long winded way of saying: I think it may be a mistake to shy away from thinking about this strategically, or without intent to prove clear ROI to our clients. If we believe what we do is valuable, we should be able to, and in fact desire to, show it.

I agree with everything you said Justin. My only caution is that if the goal of social media is money, relationship will be tough to come by. If the goal of a business is engagement and relationship I think the money and ROI will come.

Hey Tyler! Well now. At first I was going to just respond to your final (provocative) statement: that social media strategy runs the risk of turning humans into just brand robots. This critique is needed. I spend my FT job as a social media consultant, but I see my main work in teaching people (and companies) how to communicate smarter/clearer/more honestly. I don’t see strategy as being dehumanizing. I hope that my strategies do the opposite work! But still, without an ethic rested firmly on the Sermon on the Mount, any life “strategy” can become dehumanizing.

That’s why I appreciate blogs like this. Critique is so healthy.

But then you wrote in reply (above) “If the goal of a business is engagement and relationship I think the money and ROI will come.” I couldn’t agree more. It’s a horrendously large paradigm shift for business-folk, though. It will will not come easy.

Well said, and I agree…translating digital relationships into real life, face to face relationships is solid. Nothing like it.