marketing and public relations investment by getting the message to
the right people. It drives website
traffic, and it builds the brand by
fostering trust in an organization.
“You are my best friend for the great
things you told me in five seconds,”
Safko said. While making direct sales
pitches is frowned upon, using quality content to showcase expertise can
broaden a company’s markets.
Finding Business Value
Social media is free and flexible. But
like media in general, direct return on
investment (ROI) is difficult to measure. Sure, there are programs that
identify trends, hits, and other activity. But they cannot show direct ROI,
experts say.
“Everyone would love to see the
straight line between the Tweets,”
PwC’s Teuber said. Even so, the general discussion “has made everyone
better off,” Teuber said, because social channels allow PwC to reach new
audiences with nontraditional topics such as cloud computing. Social
networks allow people with similar
interests to interact in real time. “So
PwC benefits through increased distribution of our ideas, and those interested in these topics find value in
a source they might previously have
not been aware of,” he said.
While businesses that market to
consumers are already enjoying the
benefits of social media, best practices
for business-to-business communication still are emerging. There are,
however, a few proven steps that firms
can take to get into the conversation.
Blogs, for example, can push an
organization higher in search engine
optimization (SEO) results, accord-
For smaller firms
that want to get
the most from
their marketing
investments, social
media helps level
the playing field with
larger competitors.
ing to an informal survey conducted
by Lee Odder, a blogger for toprank-
blog.com. Of the 326 respondents to
his 2011 Twitter survey, 87.4 percent
said they have “successfully increased
measurable SEO objectives as a direct
result of blogging.”
In fact, 54 percent of respondents
reported a measurable improvement
in search engine results within the first
three months of blogging, and 94 per-
cent in the first 12 months. In addition,
92 percent said blogging will continue
to be an important search engine opti-
mization tool and marketing tactic for
at least the next three years.
Experts suggest starting with
LinkedIn. With 135 million members already, this social network for
professionals gains two new members per second. Gary Pines, principal at Harding & Co., a rainmaking
firm specializing in the actuarial and
insurance industries, said he still encounters many professionals who are
not even on LinkedIn.
“As the days go on, LinkedIn gets
more usage and is more powerful,”
Pines said, especially for turning re-
lationships into economic value.
And even those actuaries who are on
LinkedIn likely are not reaping the
value they can from the site.
