Today’s guest post is written by Tyler Orchard. 

It is a precarious journey when it comes to communicating the value proposition of social media to the C-suite.

Often, this is because there is a gap between social media’s perceived benefits and traditional business measurement.

This has led us to attempt to quantify our sales pitch. However, to be successful in persuading senior management—or anyone for that matter—we need to resist the urge to become dependent on speculative analytics.

First, allow me to preface this post by stating that quantifying social media’s ROI is a necessary endeavour. However, it is best saved for analyzing strategic programs (post-implementation), rather than steering our initial pitch.

Instead of getting stuck in the quagmire of hypothetical ROI scenarios, I recommend we focus our pitch on what social media does best: Protect and enhance a business’ intangible assets, such as reputation, brand, trust, insight, perception, and knowledge of a target audience.

Of course, many corporate decisions are viewed through a quantitative, financial lens. However, social media’s buy-in value does not fit that rigid space—not at the outset of a strategy anyway. (more…)