Marketing Sherpa’s Social Media Marketing and PR Benchmark Survey reveals that the most significant challenges for implementing social media within organizations include: lack of knowledge, inability to measure ROI, lack of budget/funding, management resistance, technical complexity and the perception of social media not being relevant to the market.
Now is the time and opportunity to boost awareness and knowledge of your brand. A big part of the problem is that most companies start social media initiatives, ad hoc without any strategy.
- Building a business case for social media marketing means doing homework:
- Know your target audience,
- Set goals(matrix for measurement, will build value and confidence for using social media and answer the roi question within your organization)
- Creating a strategy(where to place information, how to link, how often to update, value content, ownership of each site, frequency and response to monitoring sites)
- Make a plan that outlines what tactics and technologies
Researching competitor social media usage as well as success stories and case studies that reflect possibilities for your own company can go a very long way in convincing corporate management that social web engagement makes sense for your company.
The bottom line in making a case for social media is going to involve understanding the different channel & tools (social media sites), setting clear goals, understanding how your customers behave and what their preferences are for media discovery, consumption and sharing. With goals, strategy and tactics in hand, the metrics piece that measures
The most important idea is to understand is that Social Media is less about ROI and more about influence
Some excellent resources to help you get started:
http://mashable.com/2009/04/15/social-media-seo/
http://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing-kit/
What effective ideas/suggestions have you done that can jump-start someone’s social media marketing today? I look forward to hearing what you are doing to engage in this wonderful world of connection.
Passionately,
Marsha
MARSHA DIAMOND 
