Today at SES New York, Jeffrey Eisenberg talked at length about the challenges and solutions to converting customers across different social media channels and how we need to rethink how we, as marketers, measure success. 

ROI

Jeffrey contends that the average company spends $92 to bring a customer to their website and then $1 to convert.  He goes on to cite Jeff Bezos saying that creating a truly compelling customer experience is the best way that you can spend your dollars.  Amazon accounts for 25% of all online retail sales in North America, so while they do have marketing programs, the simple philosophy of creating an amazing customer experience is invaluable in creating word-of-mouth marketing.  Create this great customer experience and your customers will start to have the conversations, so be sure to provide them the venue.

Now that those conversations are happening, you should ask yourself, what is your goal for the conversations that are taking place and are you interrupting those conversations by trying to force actions such as registration, checkout, etc?  Brands are doing this by placing transactional callouts within social media channels such as Facebook that are not relevant to potential buyers at the time.  He gives the example of booking an airline flight from a Facebook page.  He goes onto say that this is not an appropriate place to have this type of transactional callout and that essentially, CTR will be low because people are coming to the Facebook page to have a conversation with the Airline, not to book a flight which they would do on the Airline’s corporate website.

He goes on to say that the #1 reason people unliked companies on Facebook was because the companies were posting too much and/or the content became too repetitive.  These same two reasons account for the #1 and #2 reasons for Twitter unfollows as well.  The takeaway from this is that the conversations going on in social media don’t always have to be about you and when you are reaching out; it needs to be all about the customer, preferably in a personalized way.

In summary, Jeffrey says that only motivation fuels persuasive momentum and companies must re-think their ideas around conversions from only sales to metrics such as:

1. Conversion to conversation

2. Conversion to consumption

3. Conversion to customer

4. Conversion to opinion holder

5. Conversion to word of mouth

Social Media is an ideal forum to drive these types of conversions.  So, what are your customers talking about and when are you interrupting them?  And perhaps most importantly, what success metrics are you using for your social media initiatives?

Thanks for reading,

Phil Greenwood - Manager, Global Web & Community Team

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