It’s time to counter a growing sentiment among social media types – including some nationally recognized practitioners who really should know better  - that trying to justify your company’s decision to pursue a social media strategy based on ROI is somehow foolish.

Now, these same high priests of social media don’t ever suggest a better alternative or method to determine whether or not your company should pursue a social media strategy, they just insist that you’ve got to do social media because it’s just so darn important, and besides your competitors are.

If their argument sounds like your teenager’s argument insisting that you’ve just got to let him stay out til 2am because everyone else is doing it, well, you’re right.

However, unlike gullible parents, the executives who make investment decisions aren’t easily duped, they don’t jump on every trendy b-school bandwagon and they’re not scared of your newfangled technology. They want more than breathless claims. They want proof.

Twitter is that thing Ashton Kutcher and Oprah play with. Facebook is the place where their teenagers waste their entire evenings. And your preoccupation with these platforms doesn’t convey cutting edge marketing savvy as much as it does pointless obsession.

If you want corporate buy-in and investment, you’ve got to demonstrate how your social media strategy will generate positive returns for the company. In real dollars, with real timelines.

The ROI opponents claim that there’s simply no way to really measure ROI. After all, they claim, How can you put a dollar value on a blog post, a blog comment, or a single tweet? As if that level of granularity is the measure that anyone is looking for.

Or they simply attempt to redefine a financial metric that has been commonly defined and routinely accepted for decades.

Reading just a few recent posts by legacy ROI opponents, I’ve seen ROI redefined as:

• Return on Impact
• Return on Impressions
• Return on Importance
• Return on Influence

And, my personal favorite for its absurd complexity and impenetrable formula: ROI should really be referred to as Return on Conversation whose formula is:

(B • I) (m+s • r)/d] / [O/(b + t + e)]

Brand Equity times the Intent of Communication times (Message plus Suitability times Reach) divided by Sustainability OVER Outcomes divided by the Cost times (the Budget plus Time to Produce plus Experience)

I believe the result is actually measured in Schrute Bucks.

The reality is that ROI is much simpler than that. You only need to know two numbers: how much you gained from your investment, and the total cost of the investment itself. That’s it.

ROI = (Gain – Cost) / Cost

If you spent $1000 and saw an increase in sales of $1500, then your ROI was:

ROI = (1500-1000)/1000 = 50%

I think I know where the disconnect is. Social media engagement typically generates an action that is non-financial in nature. You collect Twitter followers, generate retweets, get comments on your blog, add new Facebook fans, attract YouTube viewers or generate click-throughs to your website.

However, These aren’t ROI. How do I know? Because my banker won’t take Twitter followers in lieu of a check. Clear enough for you?

I don’t want to diminish the importance of engagement with your clients and your prospects. I’m a huge adherent of social media and I recognize its transformative potential, but only if it’s used strategically, with specific objectives that you can track and measure.

ROI doesn’t become ROI until it does one of two things: increases revenue or reduces costs. Those are financial impacts that are real, measurable and put a grin on your CEO’s face.

Determining ROI isn’t a laughing stock metric in the corporate world. Calculating potential ROI demands that you create a strategic plan, consider alternatives and project likely actions and returns from your program. It compels you to define precisely your plan’s objectives, put them down on paper and support them when challenged.

Simply saying that we need a social media program because our competitor has a social media program is absurd. What if their program is drains their  marketing budget without any noticeable effect? Do you want to copy that?

If you want funding, you need to justify your program with more than intemperate claims that we’ve just gotta do something. What’s your goal? To increase revenue or decrease costs? How will you do it? Who will be involved? How much time is necessary to invest? What technology platforms will you support? How will your program fit into your current operational structure? What do you want your conversational partners to do? How will your success be tracked and measured?

If you don’t know the answers, you don’t deserve the funding. Social media marketing is no different from any other marketing, it just uses new channels and has interactivity built-in. If you can’t tell me how you intend to leverage the medium and generate a positive return you can always try again next quarter after you learn.

Marketing has historically been a godsend for lousy companies. With an effective marketing team, even the surliest, most incompetent and inattentive companies could create an illusion of excellence, caring and success.

They could write a powerful and inspirational mission statement professing their devotion to essential core values and tout their commitment to clients and community.

In a word, they could lie.

They were able to craft their own deceit because there was no simple, inexpensive and effective way for any single customer to counter their message. What’s a wronged airline passenger to do when the airline bumps you from a flight, loses your luggage or confines you for hours on a frozen tarmac? Before social media, you simply had to take it. Grudgingly, angrily and frustratingly you simply had no ability to counter the beatific corporate message.

Not anymore.

If there’s any aspect of your business that sucks, you can expect these deficiencies to be magnified, not eliminated, through the effective deployment of social media.

While many large companies believe that they can continue to manage and control their message through social media channels, they’re in for a rude awakening. The explosion of social media platforms and their rapid embrace as a tool of retribution by an increasingly savvy and knowledgeable public means that they control your message, not you.

Want proof? United Airlines – with annual revenues of $17 billion and a massive marketing budget – could not control their corporate message when confronted by a single implacable passenger with a broken guitar. When Dave Carroll, a Canadian musician, could not get satisfaction from United for their baggage handlers breaking his guitar he wrote a clever song, shot a video and posted United Breaks Guitars to YouTube where it has accumulated over seven million views and nearly 25,000 negative comments from similarly disgruntled passengers.

While Dave Carroll’s effort received international attention, there are thousands of similar stories emerging every day on blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages. Legitimately unhappy customers who are simply fed up with poor service, lousy products and an uncaring or inattentive company and who decide to let everyone know exactly how rotten you are.

Social media has permanently shifted the balance of power from deep pocketed corporations to passionate and sophisticated social media participants. Got flaws? You’d better fix them.

Although Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and the other major social media platforms have enabled job seekers to reach an enormous network of people during their job search, these same tools – improperly used – also have the potential to derail and destroy your efforts if you don’t carefully manage your online persona.

The explosive growth of Facebook and its use for both personal and professional networking has revealed some cautionary tales from individuals who didn’t anticipate the damaging potential of too-familiar, vulgar or offensive profile content.

The destructive potential of an artless profile was revealed last week in a post written by Cleveland blogger clevelandsaplum. Her post detailed a candidate search for an addition to their public relations staff. After the first round of interviews, one candidate stood out as the clear favorite. But when the staff did a quick Google search and checked out his public Facebook profile, he lost any chance of being invited back.

Visible to anyone with access to Facebook, and shielded from no one was this stunning paragraph:

About Me:
I am awesome. I run sh**. I had relations with your girlfriend, and yes I got it on tape. I scoff at those less fortunate than me (read: everyone else). I tend to laugh at the handicapped as well as foreigners. I am a firm believer that women are without a doubt the weaker sex. I know more than you. I am a ridiculously huge deal. I’m utterly gorgeous, you (most likely as a result of terrible genes or an unfortunate run-in with the business-end of a shovel) are not. I make fun of ugly people, because they are ugly and they deserve it. My social life is clearly something that you will never experience because you are ugly, unpopular, or a severe combination of the two. I throw sh** onto my neighbor’s porch because I am better than them and they can’t do sh** about it. My friends are also better than you and they will let you know it. I break other people’s stuff. I do whatever I want without any regard for the repercussions. I intentionally ruin the environment via littering, not recycling, and other harmful action. I am an ass****.

Although it’s likely that this individual was attempting to be sarcastic and humorous, his description was highly offensive to those who viewed it within the company and it raised flags concerning his judgment and discretion. And in a heated competition with a dozen other qualified applicants, this was reason enough to eliminate him from consideration.

Now, go check out your own social media profiles and see if you’ve written anything that could offend or concern a potential hiring manager.

Then read these instructions to sanitize and protect your online reputation. Customize your privacy settings to restrict access to your personal information. Segregate all of your contacts into different lists, each with differing levels of access to your updates and photos. At a minimum, you should have a Personal list for your closest friends and a Professional list that allows you to connect with professional contacts but doesn’t grant access to all the intimate details of your life. Prevent photos tagged with your name from appearing in anyone else’s feed unless you specifically approve it. And restrict your personal updates solely to your close, personal friends.

Take control of your personal brand and online reputation before you become a cautionary tale yourself.

Over the past year I’ve been asked by several friends to help them prepare for and conduct their job searches. These professionals needed the standard job hunting tools: a distinctive, well-written resume, thoughtful cover letters and a thorough understanding of their personal strengths with stories that clearly demonstrated these strengths in action.

But those standard elements were just the starting point. The emergence of hugely popular social media platforms now enables job seekers to extend their reach and power  to connect with an audience that was previously inaccessible.

Every major study of employment conducted over the past 20 years confirms that the way that most people find jobs is through some type of personal connection. A tip from a friend who knows that her company is hiring. A personal introduction to a manager who’s expanding his department. Or a connection made at an industry networking event. People hire people they feel safe and comfortable with, and personal references increase the likelihood that you’ll be a safe hire.

So, how can you build your personal network and increase your chances of finding your ideal job?  Here are some quick tips:

1. Create a blog that centers around your professional expertise. Then fill it with posts. Done right, your blog will be more effective than any resume in communicating the level of your professional knowledge and insight and establishing your personal brand.
2. Make sure the name or tagline of your blog clearly conveys your special professional skills
3. Create a series of posts that teach me something about what you do. Include pictures, diagrams, samples and even a portfolio of your most effective work product. No matter what your specialty, from driving a truck to running a hedge fund, there is plenty of material you can create to educate others.
4. Read and comment on other bloggers’ sites. Every day.
5. Let the other bloggers in your industry know you exist. Send them your posts. Start a conversation. And ask them to add your blog to their blogroll so the search engines find you and rank you.
6. Go to industry events. Go online and check the monthly schedules for all the professional organizations in your area. Then attend with a pocketful of business cards that includes all of  your social media contact information.
7. When you meet someone you’d like to work for, follow them on every social media channel. Read their blog, follow their tweets, read their LinkedIn profile. Learn everything you can about them so you can stay in touch and send them articles and links you know they’ll be interested in. Help them and there’s a good chance they’ll help you.
8. Follow staffing and recruiting professionals on Twitter, facebook and LinkedIn. Their blog posts and tweets are full of useful information that can help you refine your resume, hone your interviewing skills and alert you to job openings.
9. Clean up your online networking profiles to ensure that there is nothing embarrassing or potentially offensive. No photos of you drinking, smoking or engaged in any potentially disturbing activity. Untag yourself from any potentially offensive photos that exist on any of your friends’ photo pages. Remove any offensive or vulgar language. Then modify your privacy settings so your most personal information remains private and unseen except by your closest friends.
10. Search for and connect with similar professionals on all the major social media platforms. Start conversations with them, participate in online forums and contribute to their groups. Create a Twitter list that includes only these professionals so you stay focused like a laser beam.

Remember, by leveraging these social media platforms, you get a chance to reach not only your contacts, but the entire constellation of contacts that are just one or two degrees removed from you. And you never know who’s hiring.

David Meerman Scott garnered attention this week with a 3 minute rant deploring the fixation of corporate types who insist on justifying social media marketing expenditures with Business 1.0 anachronisms like ROI (that’s Return on Investment folks).

He attracted dozens of comments from supportive readers who share his distaste for the MBA scourges who dominate corporate America and insist on facts, data and analysis to support requests for capital investment. After all, we all know that social media is good, strong relationships are beneficial, and any effort we can make to become closer to our clients should be pursued. Unless you do it wrong.

You see, there’s a burr under this social media saddle. If you do it wrong, you can irritate your prospects, alienate your clients and permanently damage your personal and company reputation.

When your CEO asks for an ROI of your social media marketing program, what he is asking for is a strategic plan and analysis of likely outcomes. Without the plan, you and your marketing/social media staff may simply leap into the social media void and flail around aimlessly, without clear objectives or measurable goals. Sure, you’ll be able to brag about the number of Twitter followers you have and the percentage of retweets you generate, but what have you really accomplished?

I admire many of the marketing activities that David has pursued over the past several years. And I agree that his approach – creating interesting, entertaining and highly useful content and then giving it away – is successful for many people and companies. But not all.

It obviously works for David. How do we know? Because he tracks the ROI of his activities. He knows that when he posts a controversial blog entry that gets commented upon across the web he generates more traffic, increases his search engine visibility, receives more comments, and sells more books. Activity = increased revenue. ROI.

The straw man in his argument is his assumption that establishing ROI requires that one track the value of every tweet, blog post, Facebook entry or YouTube submission and then generate a value of that singular activity. No one is asking that anyone do all that to prove the effectiveness of a social media program. No company can get that granular in their analysis.

However, we can demand that marketing departments have a strategy in place and mechanisms established to measure the success of that strategy. If you are going to produce and disseminate free content, you need to know what type of content you need to produce. Videos? Podcasts? Slideshows? Webinars? White papers? Interviews? And where will they be available? On your corporate website? On your blog? On your Facebook Fan Page? On all of them? Then you need to track, analyze and adapt. If the downloads of your white papers overwhelm the views of your online videos, then get busy producing more white papers. But how would you know any of this if you didn’t prepare to measure the effectiveness of your efforts?

And then what are your next steps? How do you extend the relationship with the individual who downloaded your white paper? Do you ask them to become a Twitter follower so you can engage them online? Do you ask that they join your Facebook Fan Page so they can gather even more useful content? And to what end? At some point, your actions/their reactions/the non-financial impact must convert into a financial impact or what’s the point? (hat tip to Olivier Blanchard at http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/)

If you can’t convince your CEO that you have a plan to increase revenues or reduce your costs, then you don’t deserve the investment. Don’t blame their fear of your social media prowess or resistance to trying something new. Their understanding of business fundamentals hasn’t changed. Prove the value of your ideas. Something David’s Harvard Business School audience should understand, even if David doesn’t.

During last week’s BusinessWire sponsored panel discussion at the City Club in Cleveland (video above), every panelist agreed that determining social media ROI should be a distinct component of any social media campaign. So why do so few companies track any form of ROI?

Because it’s boring.

There, I said it. The cat’s out of the bag. Determining social media ROI is tedious, dull and boring. It requires you to read reports, check analytics, create timelines and check data against specific activities and website minutiae that are profoundly uninspiring, yet absolutely necessary.

Getting a social media program off the ground is fun. It requires strategic planning, creative execution and active engagement. Everything is fresh and exciting. Every new conversation is an affirmation and every relationship is a success.

Tracking the results of this activity, however, is considerably less fun. Although there are excellent software tools, like Radian6, that will measure the success of your social media efforts, most of these cost money. Social media is supposed to be free, isn’t it? So, most small companies will likely develop some home-grown, spreadsheet based tracking mechanisms to determine their ROI.

And then, they’ll be largely ignored or neglected, like 84% of social media programs.

Because tracking ROI requires you to know what you’re measuring, how to measure, how to interpret the data, how and when to establish a baseline, how to measure impact and requires you to track specific transactional activities.

And where’s the fun in that?

Exactly one year ago today I wrote that you could put a fork in Motorola. They were done.

At the time, Motorola was reeling from a string of lackluster phone releases that failed to generate any consumer excitement, their product designs were uninspiring and their engineering and development staffs were incapable of developing innovative products for the half-dozen different mobile operating platforms that they supported.

They’d lost their design mojo and appeared unable to recapture any Wow! factor.

The New York Times reported today that their new CEO, Sanjay Jha, has bet the company’s future on Motorola’s newest iPhone combatant, the Droid. And the early buzz indicates that the Droid may very well save the company.

How did Jha design a company saving product strategy that you can apply to your business?

1. design a better experience. The single biggest complaint about the iPhone is its lack of a real keyboard. The Droid offers a thin keyboard that slides out from the phone, thereby resolving the iPhone’s most glaring weakness and instantly appealing to thousands of users who love the iPhone concept but could not live with its touchscreen keyboard. Instant win.
2. personalize the experience. There are now more than 100,000 reasons why the iPhone is so popular with its users: applications. Every user has personalized their iPhone with the apps that complement their lives. Every user’s iPhone is unique to them, and by adopting Google’s Android mobile platform, the Droid has access to a growing library of Android apps that will allow Droid users to create a uniquely personal device that can’t be replicated on any other platform.
3. create a sensory experience. Although Motorola was known as a design innovator, they haven’t introduced a compelling product design for several years. The Droid changes that. Jha understood that the visual aesthetic and the tactile sensation of holding and using the Droid was crucial. Motorola smoothed some hard edges and covered the back of the phone with a tactilely pleasing rubberized coating. In addition, they’ve incorporated a larger, 16:9 hi-res display that delivers a compelling visual experience. Overall, it’s a sensorial delight.
4. create a WOW! experience. the Droid is being released with a new navigation system from Google that has amazed the early reviewers. It’s the kind of killer app that can generate huge volumes of sales on its own since it replaces the need for in-car navigation systems. It’s visually exciting, it’s instantly understandable and it delivers exceptional value. They captured Wow!

Apple has retained its position at the top of the smartphone heap for over two years. Challengers have been easily dismissed. Until now. And if Motorola can continue to focus on designing and delivering exceptional user experiences, they may very well challenge Apple’s dominance.

Any iPhone users thinking of making the switch and betting on the Droid?

This past week saw the public release of three of the silliest attempts by professional sporting associations to manage and control the use of social media channels. The NFL, the SEC (who count as professional in my book, since three of their teams could beat last year’s Detroit Lions) and the USTA all published social media guidelines intended to control the dissemination of information by players, coaches, media representatives and even fans.

The SEC was first out of the gate with their near universal prohibition on any and all social media communications during a game. Yep, their first draft even prohibited college gameday fans from tweeting about or, heaven forbid, sending a photo of, their team’s gridiron splendor. To their credit, the SEC revised their published guidelines and acceded to the desires of rabid and frequently gun-toting fans to celebrate through concise tweets the magnificence of their student-athletes and their impressive SAT scores 40 yard dash times. As long as there are no commercial interests attached to their 140 character broadcasts.

The NFL, in all their controlling authority, were next to publish a set of draconian restrictions on social media participation. This time, the league’s prohibitions were directed at players (and anyone representing them), coaches and officials from engaging on any social media channel from 90 minutes before gametime until after all media interviews after the game’s completion. The media were also put on warning about sending any tweets or other messages that could compete with the broadcast of the game. So, a fan sitting a row below the press booth can tweet the score, but the reporter sitting six feet above him cannot. Makes sense to me.

The USTA released the silliest and least enforceable social media policy, warning against the dissemination of “certain sensitive information” that could be considered “inside information” about a match. Even Andy Roddick commented on the lameness of the USTA’s efforts. Specifically, the USTA is concerned about:

“information about the likely participation or likely performance of a player in an event or concerning the weather, court conditions, status, outcome or any other aspect of an event which is known by a Covered Person and is not information in the public domain.”

But, once someone tweets about court conditions or weather, doesn’t it immediately become public domain? Are there really any super-sensitive tennis secrets that, if revealed, would alter the fundamental nature of the sport itself?

I can understand the league prohibitions on tweeting during games. Players, coaches and officials should be focused on the game itself, not on satisfying their Twitter followers or Facebook Fans with status updates. But prohibitions on media members and even fans is both ridiculous – do they really believe we won’t tune in to watch the game if we can get a Twitter update instead – and utterly unenforceable.

Want some reasonable social media guidelines?:

1. explore ways to engage online before, during and after the games. Post a scrolling Twitter feed on the scoreboard with a scrolling feed of all comments that include your team’s hashtag. I did this during the Final Four, and the Twitter feed was more fun than the game. There are some hilarious tweets flying through the ether that could be shared with the entire stadium.
2. toss up a twitter poll during the game to make the game more interactive. Twitter poll question: Will Tom Brady throw for more yards today than the entire Cleveland Brown offense generates? 63% say YES.
3. put a highlight YouTube video up on your Facebook Fanpage at halftime and again after the game. Tweet about the video so fans can click a link and watch in the stands on their iPhones and Blackberrys.
4. sponsor contests that spectators can enter via Twitter
5. publish online stats, again distributed realtime via Twitter and Facebook
6. accept the fact that you cannot control this social media phenomenon. You can continue to publish more and more specific prohibitions and narrowly defined exceptions in a vain effort to wrestle control of these assorted publicly directed channels, but you are tilting at online windmills. Embrace the brave new world of social media, and learn how to harness its power to fulfill your own goals. They shouldn’t be too different from your fans’.

Social media can be your friend. If you play nice.

I was invited yesterday to attend a couple of high-level presentations at an enormous Cleveland-based health care concern that intends to pursue web-based fundraising initiatives.

Two groups were invited to compete for a seven figure campaign to test the efficacy and potential of web-based fundraising and each sent high-powered teams to deliver their extraordinarily mediocre messages through their numbingly ineffective PowerPoint presentations.

At the end of the day, after our private recap of both presentations, we were all in agreement that neither company did themselves any favors with their presentations, although each had the potential to blow the other out of the water with an exemplary, creative, memorable and distinctive presentation.

What went wrong? Both were wedded to the PowerPoint presentation template that insists on delivering text based information in a visual environment. With bullets. Endless bullets. Each one read to us. Just in case we had become suddenly stricken illiterate.

So, let’s review. Each presenter brings a laptop to connect with a high-resolution LCD projector capable of displaying brilliant video, and each decides to present…. (wait for it)… TEXT. Brilliant.

Here’s the rub. Both competitors had amazing, compelling and memorable stories to tell. Huge, nationally recognized clients with exciting success stories. Creative campaigns that generated lasting results. And neither elected to tell any of these stories.

However, we were graced with annoyingly derivative methodology diagrams, dense process flow charts and unnecessary recitations of dry stats and figures that contributed nothing to our attempt to determine one thing: are you the guys we want to execute this campaign?

Let’s revisit the irony here… two firms send teams to demonstrate how wonderfully creative and capable they are and both center their presentations not around story, emotion, community, engagement or connections (words not even mentioned for the first 90 minutes), but around bullet points. I’m sold.

I know it’s been said before, but let’s say it again:

1. tell a story. first. foremost. If you don’t know how, read Beyond Bullet Points and learn. Before your next presentation. I’ll remember a story. I won’t remember that 4.8% of direct mail recipients will elect to give their contact information if presented with a free premium option. Or is that 8.4%? Or 6.9%? Oh hell, I forgot.
2. use visuals. See the slide deck embedded above. Simple graphics aren’t so simple, but they are devastatingly effective. And they support your story. (see how this all ties together?)
3. edit ruthlessly. Don’t use eight words when five will do. Or two. This is a presentation, not a shared group reading session. If you pick the right visual, you won’t need a single word on the slide.
4. learn your presentation. I believe that most presenters fill their slides with bullet points as a crutch. They’re afraid that they’ll forget to mention something, so they make sure that every single talking point is included in their slides. The solution: practice. Learn what you want to say with each visual. Use the slide notes feature if you need to have a visual reminder visible only to you. Just get rid of the lists of text that detract from you and your story.

Want to separate yourself from your competitors? Learn how to tell a visually compelling story. Your clients will be eternally grateful that they never have to sit through another miserable PowerPoint bullet point recitation and you’ll be their hero. Win win.

A recent study released by Universal McCann reveals that we are immersed in the fourth wave of internet usage characterized by social networking participation. Their study notes that social networks are becoming the dominant platform for personal interaction and content creation and distribution.

The global internet audience now totals 625 million people, with almost 100 million of those users located in the United States. Nearly two-thirds of these users are active in one or more social networks.

What’s also revealed is how these users spend their time on the social networks. The most popular activity was watching video, followed by listening to streaming audio, blogging and connecting with friends.

What does this mean for you or your industry?

First of all, the place to connect with people – whether personally or professionally – is on one of the social networks. They’ve made their choice how they want to interact with others, and it’s not through email. For professionals, this typically means LinkedIn, though Facebook is being used more and more by professionals who have learned to adjust their privacy settings so as not to share overly personal information with other professional contacts.

These trends also mean that you need to generate content that is interesting, engaging and compelling enough to generate views and inspire your connections to share your content with their own network of friends and colleagues. The dominant format for this content: video. If you’re not creating videos to put on your site, your blog, your LinkedIn page, your Facebook Fan Page, then it’s time to start.

But don’t stop with video. Over 70% of social networkers also post photos to their pages. People want to see who they’re connecting with, and a thoughtfully designed series of photos can generate a powerful impression. For the professional, these can include images of your office, your personal workspace, your coworkers and even photos from events that you participate in. Sharing some personal visual insights will increase your familiarity, strengthening your connections with your networks.

Finally, if your company really wants to engage online, you need to create a community that’s worth joining. That means frequently updated, compelling content. The promise of interaction with other, like-minded people. A thoughtful, meaningful – even delightful – user experience. And the ability to listen to your community members and adjust your activities to satisfy their needs, not yours.