Engagement ROI Model

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ROI from Engagement in social media
It is very popular to state that you should Engage with your customers in social media. Yet not every form of engagement is valuable and delivers an ROI. From tests on OpenNetworkers.info
we can conclude that:

• The engagement should be targeted to the individual fields of interest
• II should add value 
• The more personal an engagement is, the better your chances to add Value (a 'Skype videoconference' is more personal as a mere 'e-mail', because it is instant and you can see the other person)
• Some Brands and products need more time in engagement than others ('Apple' or 'iPad' is more popular than 'IRS' or 'financial advice'
• It is much more accepted that engagements that are product oriented should lead to a return in Value (payment online) than service oriented engagements ('financial advice').

So beware of just accepting the general idea of engagement as a best practice for social media, it is not only insufficient, it is superficial. Always set your goals in advance, measure your time and resources spend and compare it to your normal costs of (e.g. offline) engagements.

More about Engagement; hype, sense or non-sense?
Stating that Social media has become a 'hype' is somewhat of an understatement. Over the past few years I must say that I have been amazed at the growth in interest, not just by people wanting to share their social life, but also by companies trying to find new marketing openings.

As with everything that people don't fully understand, social media also comes with a lot of assumptions about 'how to best achieve corporate value'. It also amazed me to notice how long it took before there even was a discussion raised about the ROI of social media activities. In fact, we just 'did it' hoping that we would get something in return, in the long run. 

                                        '..Give and thou shall receive..' seemed to be the gospel.

When we noticed that just 'doing it' didn't result in any meaningful growth in new business leads, we were quick to point out other, more softer values to target such as general brand exposure and probable positive brand sentiment fall-out. No-one seemed to really care for the hard numbers, no one really focused on the one and only central question we all should have asked:

                       How much Time and Effort does it really take in order to achieve what ROI?

Managers are now discovering for themselves that social media for companies is quite something different than just having fun and sharing socially on a personal basis. Finally, we do seem to realize that we can measure things like content and brand impact in social media, their added value in generating new business. 
An eruption of disappointment in social media expertise is therefore imminent, just because it is valid. I am looking forward to your comments underneath..