Gasoline price rising and loss of $15,5 billion in the second quarter have pushed GM to move forward and try new things. And the new thing is the relaunch of the social media strategy with the release of the new GMnext.com platform. Featuring executive blogs, consumer generated content, and social media tools (like Twitter and Youtube), the so-called social platform aims at targeting young car buyers. This is the context. But GM is missing the important part of the way it works with social media … Read More

From review of the business use of social media, the art of the customer surveys, the Redbull experiment of social graph, to the ROI of social media (that isn’t a one shot data), its lifecycle, and an influence study. Here are the links: Read More

I’ve been walking around the Mashable! post “How to measure social media ROI for Business” for 2 days, being irritated by the fact people say we can’t measure ROI of social media efforts. Aaron Uhrmacher, author of that post, is telling (you should be reading that post if not done already) there’s no accepted metrics, statistics-based ones, to measure social media ROI. How can it be possible there’s no accepted metrics? Return on investment concept is clear: for $1 I invest, how many comes up? Applied to social media efforts, for $1 I invest how much do I earn? or maybe a better way to say, how can I measure impact of social media on my company bottom line, directly or indirectly? Which then is possible. Read More

Social Media is about connecting people and sharing thoughts, ideas, feedbacks, and information. CRM is about connecting and creating stickiness to the brand. You measure CRM programs efficiency checking the returning visitors, time spent, evolution of the customer average shopping cart, % of subscription cancelled, % of new members recruited, … Social Media is a different tool to lead people to CRM programs. There’s then no discussion about how to measure impact of engagement with social media. Read More

Twitter is like the hype itself since its launch. Everybody’s using it and this webservice smells like there’s some great opportunity integrating it into communications planning and marketing strategies. But how can 140-words text improve brand reputation? What is the return on investment of such an application for brands and above all how can it become a competitive advantage using it? Not so easy to answer but after some use you’ll discover Twitter is more useful and engaging that you may think, but only if associated with a blog and social media activity (see this post regarding social media activity). Read More

Following the article “Social Media + Consumer Opinion + Brand = opportunities brands have to join the conversation“, it was necessary to add some words about ROI brands can leverage joining the conversation. I would look over 3 different stages of what I call “joining the conversation” to speak about the social media ROI: taking the floor by blogging, monitoring social networks and contributing to the social media, and social media advertising using knowledge and network acquired through social media activity. Read More