HOW TO COST JUSTIFY A SOCIAL MEDIA NEWS ROOM

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Creating or re-designing your current news room into a social news room to keep up with today's business requirements means you will have to justify the costs to the CFO.

Be prepared. Your presentation will have to have a hook so powerful you can hang a hat on it.

They will ask questions. Many. Then many more. Each question will have money attached.

What They're Not Looking For

Let me give you a powerful hint. The answers they're looking for are not impressions, views, comments, links, feeds or community building. They won't care how cool it is or how the features or functions are "killer."

CFO's are easy to neuro-linguistically read. They'll usually give you a visceral indication of how you're presentation is faring.


Presentational Logic (Make it Up Math)

You're going to have to be "creative," in a "make it up math for the better of all humanity" type of way. I used a straightforward and fairly simple presentation to my CFO. I hammered and yammered about the value, payback, and powerful possibilities of the Social Media News Room. Of course, being a CFO, they will expect to see the numbers. The math. So, I presented the SMNR ROI (quite effectively I might add, if I do say so myself) with this instructional video.

SMNR ROI MATH
28/7=13



Yeah - you guessed it.

He suggested I fund it myself through personal payroll deductions.

END:

Return to "Social-Media News Releases Are Absolutely Worthless!

Comments

Anonymous said…
It's not clear to me that anyone -- anywhere -- will ever have success cost justifying a social media news room.

Even if you get the funding, what CFO really wants that? Perhaps the question to ask is how social media investments can be embedded within or integrated with initiatives that CAN be cost justified. How can you hide them in other words?

If it's a lead generation initiative, for instance, is it necessary to detail every line item? The CFO just wants to know how sales-ready leads will produce sales and, if they will, what's the investment for producing those sales-ready leads. Right?

I can't present an ROI for time in twitter (I sure can't use the acronym for it), but perhaps I can bury my twitter time within a PR initiative that will create greater market awareness or, maybe, put new prospects in the pipeline. Yeah, money. Tell him (or her) about all the money you will be producing. Just don't explain all the dirty and disturbing acts (of social media interaction) that are necessary to create all this cash. Some behavior simply can't be justified. ;>)

Britton Manasco
Illuminating the Future
November 2, 2008 at 2:34 PM
Anonymous said…
I love any Abbot and Costello reference, and it certainly applies to social media ROI. But I agree with some of Britton's comments on this.

Check out the Katie Paine's measurement blog. I also wrote a piece on how to measure social media ROI for Mashable that might help.
November 3, 2008 at 8:15 PM
Steve Kayser said…
Aaron:

Excellent article on Mashable.com http://mashable.com/2008/07/31/measuring-social-media-roi-for-business/Thanks for the link. Well-written and helpful. I didn't write the article to disparage anyone in anyway - just tongue-in-cheek. But based upon real world experiences, reactions, etc. -- I've met Katie before. She does super work As far as measurement ... It's a "have to have" these days. Nice to meet you
November 3, 2008 at 9:41 PM
Steve Kayser said…
Hey Britton - Thanks for stopping by. Your blog looks great. Haven't heard from you in a while. Thanks for the comment. This was a tongue-in-cheek post. But my CFO loved it. Measuring social media is sorta like measuring social media news releases. Tough, because they're fairly new to most small-to-medium sized businesses - and not really embraced except for the cognoscenti in the company. They're looked down upon by lawyers for companies ... risky sharing all that stuff. They looks good - but where are the results? It just takes time and experimenting -- some will win, some lose.

Thanks for the comment - hope all is well.

The results
November 3, 2008 at 10:05 PM
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