Social Media, Stats, Is it Advertising?

The Nielsen Company released stats on the top 10 U.S. social networking/blogging sites for the 3rd Quarter of 2011. Leading was Facebook (of course) with an average monthly audience of more than 140 million. Blogger, with a 50 million audience is the closest competitor, nearly one-third of the Facebook audience.

The other top ten: Twitter at 23 million, Wordpresss at 22 million, MySpace at 19 million, LinkedIn at 17.7 million, Tumblr at 11.8 million, Six Apart Typepad at 8.5 million, Yahoo Pulse at 8.4 million and Wikia at 7.6 million.

What's that mean to event marketing and public relations professionals?

It leaves us scrambling to prove the efforts and expense are worth the results. In Wildfire's report on Social Media ROI, "Earned Media" (unpaid publicity created by users about your brand/event) is the unique benefit of a social media campaign. Wildfire offers theses stats on social media users:

• 78% are directly influenced by branded posts when making purchases
• 74% encourage friends to try new products
• 80% try new things based on friends’ suggestions

Ironically, while most of us in marketing and public relations believe in the value of of social media, it isn't exactly the highest paid area of the agency business. Advertising Age this week came out with a report that senior digital executives at New York-based shops bill clients bill nearly half per hour for social media or "digital execs" time as they do for traditional agency creatives - $630 vs $350. 

In May of this year, GM stated that the company would stop advertising on Facebook (this news just before Facebook's IPO). 

As an event promoter, my company began developing social media campaigns four years ago to combat the declining audiences of traditional media. One regional event we promote had relied heavily on radio and print advertising for selling tickets. Yet, the writing was on the wall as each year ratings for the top stations saw reduced shares of the audience and newspaper subscriptions were dumped for online and mobile/cell phone news hits. 

Unlike the major advertisers who spend more money on an ad agency retainer than my clients have for five years of advertising, our budgets have been stuck in the mud for five years while the diversity of media and splintering of the audience grows. Additionally we have to buy traditional media from 3 major metro markets to fill the event. That means maximizing the reach, interaction and call to action of each and every dollar spent.

So how do you do that? Increase attendance, while buying Los Angeles, Riverside and San Diego DMA radio and television, on a beer budget? Over the years, we've relied on publicity - public relations - that "earned media" to fill in our budget gaps. With declining circulation and declining print pubs - that's out. With splintered television due to bundled cable/fios and satellite, and reduced budgets at all news stations - getting free live broadcasts has become far more difficult.

Enter social media - and the constant push for content, interactivity with fans, driving results and fans to sponsors for measured results, and in reality an entire new ballgame. Our Festival campaign includes Cross Marketing with traditional media, social media components of all broadcast and print media, a separate social media campaign that engages the fans and provides unique "you heard it first" info, and an aggressive approach to finding and engaging key writers, bloggers and online media to spread the word.

In 2011 after a two year push to obtain fans on Facebook, followers on Twitter and email addresses for eblasts, the regional event in question had a 51% increase in online ticket sales. 2012 results are pending but here are some sobering statistics that should tell you where to derive your ROI on an event social media campaign:

• 2011 # of Impressions 17.1 million
• 2012 # of Impressions 285 million (we also employed better tracking practices, and auditing services)
• 2011 # of inches 750 print inches
• 2012 # of inches 2731 print inches.

The conclusion - by measuring the "earned media" results alone, the social media campaign paid off. By measuring online ticket sales it paid in buckets. What did it cost?It is not advertising and my firm has never BOUGHT Facebook ads nor pay per click.

I'm guessing that Facebook will figure a better way to monetize other than pure paid ads. The third party apps that create contests do wonders for increasing a fan base and fan interaction - Facebook and Mr. Z would be wise to create their own for a "fee." Keep it small though boys so us little guys can survive.

We are sold on the ROI despite the time spent - an average of 5 hours per day of direct communication and content creation over a six week time frame. And no, in this neck of woods we didn't charge $350 an hour (value $73,500) - Wish we could. Personally, I'm waiting to be discovered and SMing my way to discovery cuz I'd love that kind of pay.