Nancy Hendrickson

An online quipster poised the question: “How do you measure the return on investment (ROI) of social media marketing?”  He then answered his own question with “You don’t.”

Fortunately, that’s not exactly true.

As  businesses scramble to set up Facebook, Twitter and MySpace pages, analysts are scrambling to discover how impactful their company’s SMM has been. For some, the answer is “we can’t measure this,” but others believe there are statistics that reflect their SMM’s effect.

According to a 7,000-person 2010 U.S. Small Business Attitudinal Survey from the email marketing provider, ConstantContact

• 93.6% of business owners need help in finding the best way to get new customers
• 92.1% want help encouraging existing customers to refer more business
• 92% want help to identify the best online marketing tools

When asked what specific area of their business they need the most help in, 66.5% ranked either “Marketing,” “Sales/new business,” or “Growth planning/business growth” as their single biggest area of need.

Interestingly, this is a far larger percentage than those who need help with technology, legal, manufacturing, and other operational aspects of their business.

Wringing every  drop of effectiveness from your website is paramount, especially for entrepreneurs who rely on their websites to generate at least 50% of their revenue.

If you want more business or referrals from existing customers, we recommend surveying your existing customers. As the old saying goes, there’s nothing quite like getting it directly from the horse’s mouth!

A popular post from last year

Would you buy your own products?

I heard something yesterday that really got me thinking about this.

Someone called into A Way With Words–the National Public Radio show that discusses language, as in regional dialects, slang, word origins, grammar, and weird expressions–and asked about the use of “dog food” as a verb.

Apparently the term had its birth in the software/tech industry, and was used as a way of saying that software developers should actually use the products they were developing. Dog food (the verb) has evolved to mean “to use a product or service that was created by you.”