For years ROI or Return on Investment was a term used just by business people.
Hard core accountant types in suits and analytics obsessed marketers who worked for them looked at ROI. Meanwhile
search marketers often focused on rankings, traffic and conversions.
Then ROI went mainstream as not only SEOs turned to ROI as the an important metric. Why?
After rankings and traffic have become too unreliable to measure success on the Web.
Is the ROI of social media and blogging a viable metric though?
From sense to nonsense
ROI was not a common metric on the Web at all in the beginning.
To this day many people rely on traffic to measure performance.
Yet it started to change over time when the Web grew up.
Most notably the book Web Design for ROI I already mentioned made a huge leap in reversing the process of designing websites.
A good looking homepage or a “bigger logo” was key for many execs until then.
Now the check out forms or sign up pages are the most important parts of the website.
Now ROI measuring turns into madness though.
It happens in the course of overt monetization of everything. Many turn to measuring the ROI of blogs and social media.
Yet those are rather discovery channels and place where people visit without monetary exchange.
A blog or social site is not the same as an online store!
What’s the ROI of your mom?
At the height of the ROI frenzy a half satirical infographic went viral: “what’s the ROI of your mom?” It asked.
Popular pundit Gary Vaynerchuk also made a point of this a few years later:
the ROI of my own mother is everything.
He goes on to explain in more detail:
The reason I am able to do anything I do now, have the success I have, is because of my mother.
As if ROI was a applicable to these media types. You can’t really measure the often intangible benefits of writing and socializing.
To get the point across across quickly I ask you three questions:
- Do you measure the ROI of meeting your friends?
- Do you measure the ROI of reading books?
- Do you measure the ROI of giving away presents?
Now you probably understand where I’m at. ROI is a monetary metric.
I invest 100$ and get 200$ thus my ROI is 100%. The same applies to time spent on work.
How in contrast do you want to measure time spent on things that are part work, part leisure?
In the current society the difference between work and leisure blur more and more each day.
The disappearance of the work-life balance is largely due to the nature of the Web itself.
Not only you can be online 24/7 you also give away things for free and get others also for no cost changes our notions of work.
Are you working or social networking or both?
Do I work when writing this blog?
Well, not really — or partly — as I am not earning money directly.
Do I earn money because of the blog? I do.
How do I know which money or how much of it ensued due to me writing the blog? I can’t. Often it is not measurable.
Also you have to ask yourself whether it is desirable to measure it.
You do not want to measure the ROI of your relationships.
Yet you will have to admit that having a partner or children has a very positive impact on your life and thus your success at work.
Social media are virtual spaces where you do not meet real friends.
You do not meet anybody in the sense of actually meeting them in person face to face.
Yet you contact people you would have otherwise never “meet”.
Can you measure the ROI of meeting people virtually you have otherwise never met? Do you really want to measure it at all?
This is also one of the most important differences between a social media campaign and a long term social media approach.
In a campaign you often simply buy ads and measure $.
Are you considering a long term approach?
Then you set other, more important goals that are not measurable especially by such simple metrics like ROI.
You can’t simply measure the ROI of social media relationships.
Yet they may pay out in manifold ways.
What else can you do then to establish worthwhile and measurable goals?
Share of voice (SOV) is a modern metric you might want to measure instead. It’s even more important in the AI era.
Measuring the real ROI of connections
Do you still want to measure something like ROI?
Popular social media management tools like SproutSocial HootSuite offer in-depth guides and tools for measuring ROI.
Yet you don’t have to reduce ROI to money!
Genuine human connections are often invaluable!
ROI for a (private) blog can be the number of comments on your posts. 5 comments by 5 people mean 500% blogging ROI.
5 new connections made on LinkedIn are also 500% ROI there.
No complex formula needed. Keep it simple!
Without blogging or social media activity there would be no comment or connections.
Every meaningful and real human connection can also yield measurable results down the road.
Long term relationships may be beneficial for decades!
