Lessons Learned from The Social Media R.O.I. That Was, Then Wasn’t

When a client of my digital public relations agency, Handshake Media, Incorporated, called and said the video we had created for the company - uploaded to YouTube, posted on our company’s blog, Handshake 2.0, and showcased in our company’s Twitter stream and on our company’s Facebook page - had resulted in a phone call for an appointment, I was ecstatic.  Return on investment - R.O.I. - from a social media campaign!  It worked!  Having been without a salary for a year as the founder of a start-up, I dubbed the effort The $50,000 Video.

I found out a few days ago that the phone call did not ultimately result in an appointment.  No ROI from a social media campaign.  I updated the post:  "In terms of ROI, my $50,000 video is now a $0 video."

Lessons learned:

• When I accept a client on an exchange-of-services basis, I need to serve that client as if it were a full-paying client. I’m not proud to realize that I did not follow up with this barter client as I should have, or would have believed was professional and ethical to do.  I assumed the last news was the latest news.  That’s both illogical and a poor business practice.
• When I accept a barter client, I need to be in a position to offer full service. As my company evolves, the timing may be better than at others for such an exchange. I need to make thoughtful, conscious choices about this.
• I need to manage expectations - both my own and those of my clients.  When I once heard a guy say, “I am a manager of expectations,” I wanted to run, not walk, from such a dour, drab, numbing statement. And, yet… I wrote business plans in exchange for future stock options during the heady days of dot-com.  I could wallpaper a room with plans from never-businesses.  I can fall prey to one-hit madness. Would I want a single YouTube video, one Twitter tweet, one sparkling blog post to “go viral”?  You bet!  And I know my clients would, too!  Do I have a secret wish with each post and show and tweet that this might be the one?  Yep.  But to quote Marshall Sponder, “...sustainable results don’t come from a quirk, they come from sustained effort - and there may be ups and downs. I like to think the same thing is true about Social Media.”

The experience was troubling and, frankly, humiliating, and the lessons hard and well-deserved.

Yet, I'll  finish with this wisdom from Adam Singer:  “Embrace imperfection. Part of social media means, well, being social. And our social interactions are by their very nature imperfect. Some of the best blogs on the planet are hardly perfect, but that’s not what makes them compelling.”

May my sustained effort on behalf of my clients generate sustainable R.O.I.