Join the conversation on our Fan Page

This semester I’m teaching a course at Emerson College in Boston entitled Social Media and Marketing. If this topic interests you, there are many ways you can participate. The easiest is joining our Facebook fan page, “Why Social Media Matters.” My goal is to contribute to meaningful discourse about the role of social media in our lives and our businesses. Feel free to drop on by and stay for a while. I’m going to blog quite frequently about it as well.

One of the things I love about social media is how simple it can be. Sure, you can make social media complex. You can measure metrics, use social marketing models and chart the growth of communities over time. However, you can also create one powerful idea. An idea that doesn’t require anything but others willing to play along.

Take the idea of Follow Friday for example. Hundreds of thousands participate weekly in nominating their friends to be followed on Twitter. The concept is simple, and the participation is contagious. To play, you just need a Twitter account. What if we applied the concept of Follow Friday to our lives? Maybe we’d call it “Have you met” Tuesdays. And we would share the great people we know with others we cared about.

Why does social media matter to you?

(Packed House at SMB10 by Bob Collins on Flickr)

The theme of Social Media Breakfast Boston 10 was “ Getting ROI Out of Social Media.”
HubSpot’s CEO Brian Halligan discussed their method for measuring how social media conversations translate into sales.
Marketers at the event suggested that hiring good content people is a more attractive alternative than buying advertising.
Matt Cutler, Vice President, Marketing & Analytics at Visible Measures, presented on the ROI of viral video.
Visible Measures has powerful tools for measuring viral impact, a database of millions of videos and criteria to evaluate what makes videos “go viral.”
Matt drew a comparison to how much Nike would have had to spend on TV commercials to create the same impact that one of their viral videos had (with 16M views).

He calculated that broadcast TV CPMs are apx. $25 and online video CPMs are apx. $50-75, and he created an estimate.
His formula needs to add one critical consideration: context.
Watching a viral video forwarded to me by a friend, posted in a favorite blog or on a social network is worth much more than a tv spot that interrupts my show.