As marketing dollars have become more scarce, the importance of measuring ROI and building a business case to support investment has become paramount.  For those seeking to better understand this subject, here’s a “simple” methodology for quantifying value.  In this case, we’ll look at ROS (return on spend = expected revenue divided by cost of online media) and ROI (expected net present value divided by total investment) from online campaigns.  If you find it to be of value, or if you have additional questions, please comment below.

Steps to Calculating Value

1. Determine the Value metric (Revenue, Margin, NPV) of a customer.
Some companies look at value of a transaction, annual revenue per customer or lifetime value (profit) of a customer.  Some assign higher values for new customers vs. a new sale to an existing customer. You need to determine what is best for your organization (hint: choose the metric that is most used by your executives).  For this example, let’s assume your average sale is $1,000 and that the lifetime value of a customer is $5,000.

2.  Assign conversion rates to approximate close rates.
Let’s assume 3% of site visitors request more information (inquiries) and that 30% of inquiries complete a purchase.  If you’ve done online campaigns before, you should have a basis for inquiry rates.  Hopefully your VP-Sales know how many leads convert to a transaction. If 3% of visitors become leads, and 30% of leads are closed, 0.9% of visitors will become customers.

3. Determine what your cost or investment will be.
Let’s assume you will spend $10,000 in online advertising (display, search, email, etc.) this month.

4. Do the math to calculate ROS and ROI:
Assuming your efforts drive 2,000 incremental visitors to your site (cost: $5 each) you should see 60 new leads (3% conversion rate) and 18 new customers (30% close rate) worth $18,000 in revenue or $1.80 direct ROS ($1.80 in revenue for every $1 spent).

The Net Present Value of the 18 customers is $90,000 ($5,000 each) yielding a Return On Investment of 900%.

If you present these types of results to your CFO, you’ll quickly find a lot of interest (and dollars) in online marketing.

Another Metric: Value per Engagement
Another way to measure results is calculating value per engagement (visit, inquiry, etc.).  In the example above, each visit is worth $9 in revenue ($18,000 divided by 2,000 visits), whereas each inquiry is worth $300 ($18k divided by 60), compared to a cost per visit of $5 and a cost per inquiry of $166.67.

Remember Your Margins
While revenue is an easy metric to measure, margins are much more important.  Assuming your gross margin is 60%, you are making profit as long as your cost per visit is less than $5.40 or cost per inquiry is less than $180.

Caveat Emptor!
Please use good judgment when applying these methodologies to your own business. Again, these are not a panacea for every situation.  But hopefully, they will give you some building blocks for quantifying the impact of your interactive marketing program.  If you have specific questions, please leave them here.  I can’t promise I’ll know the answer, but I’ll do my best to help you figure it out.  Happy number crunching!

Please feel free to COMMENT, SHARE with others and SUBSCRIBE to our blog. We look forward to your feedback!

Steve Latham, founder and ceo

 
@stevelatham

Success begins with a plan. Yet when it comes to social media, most dive in without a thorough understanding of objectives, platforms, tactics, requirements, responsibilities and metrics for measuring performance.

Most marketers also fail to understand the pitfalls and shortcomings that can prevent them from achieving their social media marketing goals, including:

• content that is overly promotional
• content that is not engaging or relevant to target audiences
• a one-way outbound approach to communicating (it’s all about me!)
• failing to build a network (without reach, there is no ROI)
• one-off isolated efforts vs. an integrated approach

What most lack is a comprehensive social media strategy.  To address this growing need, I developed a new presentation to help marketers understand the opportunities, challenges and pitfalls of social media marketing while providing an operational framework for developing a social media strategy.

My presentation “Social Media Strategy” addresses the following:

• 5 point business case for social media
• 7 common pitfalls of social media (and steps to avoid them)
• 10 point outline for a social media strategy

This presentation provides the information you need to craft a social media strategy.  If you find it valuable, please feel free to comment below and share with others.  Enjoy and good luck with your social media strategy!

Steve Latham
Follow me on Twitter

Related posts and presentations
Business Case for Social Media
New Media Toolkit
Social Media: Shiny Object or Killer App?

I came across a recent Forrester post on Attribution and felt the need to comment…  I’ll be short and to the point!

I agree the concept of attribution is not new but unfortunately there are still many issues that need to be addressed, such as…

1. Ad servers reliance on their tag to be served on the last visit preceding an action. Unless I’m mistaken, ad servers above can only attribute credit for prior engagements if the last click preceding the conversion is goes through their server. Unfortunately most conversions are preceded by visits from direct navigation and/or natural search.  So unless the ad server integrates with site analytics data, they can’t attribute credit for a majority of online conversions.

2. Lack of an agreed upon methodology for recasting the cost per action across the touch-points that played a supporting role. How far back do you go? How many impressions are worth one click? How do you split the credit across different types of media?  We have our views and am sure others have theirs.  And most are probably based on sound logic.

3. Acknowledgment that our ability to measure impact is severely limited by increasing use of multiple devices (work, home, mobile) and cookie deletion. We’ve seen for years that users often browse at work and buy at home.  Now they are relying more and more on their mobile devices for browsing, making it pretty tough to figure out how and where they are becoming engaged and interested in our offer.  For every action we can measure via cookies, there must be 3-4 that we can’t measure.

To sum it up, engagement mapping and attributing credit across touch-points is an important and useful approach.  But it alone will not tell the whole story.  Market testing and surveys should also be included in your toolkit for determining what works in online media.

Related articles and presentations:
Online Demand Generation: Strategy and Metrics
Making Sense of Online Campaign Results: Part 1
Making Sense of Online Campaign Results: Part 2

I hope you find this helpful or at least thought-provoking.  Feel free to share with your colleagues, clients and propellerheads who are into web analytics and media modeling!

Steve Latham
Follow us on Twitter!

The online media landscape is in a constant state of change, and with the growing list of opportunities to use digital media as a marketing channel, the tools are evolving quickly.  Below is my New Media Toolkit – a list of online apps, services and vendors that I’ve found to be of great value.  It is by no means comprehensive, but if you need help today, these are great places to start!

Competitive Intelligence Tools

• Quantcast is an outstanding resource for assessing visitor demographics and user interests for your site and competitors’ sites.
• Compete.com is one of my favorites for analyzing comparative site traffic and levels of engagement over time.
• Alexa.com should be mentioned as well.  While I don’t trust the data for site traffic (see Can You Trust Competitive Site Data?), it is the only free estimate that shows the number of page views per visit.  Since Compete no longer offers this for free, Alexa is still useful.

Search Engine Marketing Tools

• Google Estimator allows you to forecast ad inventory, cost per click and projected media spend for a given set of keywords and geographic market.  While this is better than nothing, the results may vary significantly from reality for a variety of reasons.  Use with caution.
• Google Ad Preview allows you to see how search results appear in different parts of the World
• Search Status Toolbar from Quirk: one plug-in allows you to see keyword density, no-follow links, page rank, inbound links and other great tools (referred to me by Catfish Comstock)
• Google Trends and Google Insights are valuable tools for seeing trends in keyword searches. This is one of the best ways to measure changes in demand due to cyclical or seasonal factors.

Social Networking Sites

• Facebook: join me and 600 million of my extended friends. Just don’t freak out when your mother sends you a friend request (love you mom!)
• LinkedIn – if you are in business and you are not on LinkedIn, you are missing the boat. Seriously.
• Twitter - before you say no, take a test drive.  It’s a great way to promote your content and you may even have fun doing it.
• Slideshare – best described as “You Tube for Powerpoint” slideshare is the #1 place to post your presentations and demonstrate thought leadership.  It also happens to have some powerful Google juice; several of my presentations have top rankings (e.g. “Social Media Business Case“). To see how it works check out my Social Media Strategy preso.

Social Bookmarking and News Sites

• While there are many social bookmarking sites, I prefer Digg.com and Propeller.  Stumbleupon is also worth exploring. I tried using Newsvine but they suspended me for linking to my own blog (now that’s an interesting policy…).
• In terms of online marketing news, I like the eMarketer, Online Media Daily (MediaPost), AdExchanger and IAB SmartBrief newsletters
• There are many social media news sites, but if you have time for only one, subscribe to Mashable for the latest in social media news and other cool things of interest.

Social Media Tools
No media toolkit would be complete without recommending some tools to help you manage social media activities. Here are a few for your Tweeting and Posting pleasure:

• URL Shortening: http://bit.ly allows you to truncate links and track click-throughs. Nice way to curate content.
• Post / Tweet Aggregators:  Over the past 12 months I have used numerous post / tweet management tools including Ping.fm, Twitterrific, TweetDeck and TweetLater.  But I now use and recommend Hootsuite for several reasons: 1) ability to post to multiple profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Fan pages and LinkedIn, 2) scheduling capabilities, 3) great stats, 4) intuitive interface and 5) good iPhone app.  I also use Twitter Selective Status Facebook app as it allows you to selectively update Facebook status when tweeting old-school style (using Twitter.com) simply by adding #fb at the end of the tweet.
• Another aggregator (a must have!) is Nutshell Mail. It is a very useful app that aggregates updates from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and sends them to you in an email.  If you are blocked from accessing social networking sites at work, this will help. I also LOVE that it allows me to Unfollow with one click from the email.  It’s easier and faster to Unfollow from Nutshell than it is from Twitter.
• Social Media Bookmark aggregator: Onlywire is a decent plug-in that allows you to share once and post across most social bookmarking sites.  If you have a blog you can use it for free (just add some code to your blog).  Or you have to pay $2.99 per month.
• Blog Monitoring: several vendors offer solid toolsets.  The more robust and comprehensive, the more expensive, ranging from SM2 and Addictomatic (both are free) to the not-so-free social media monitoring tools BuzzMetrics and Radian6.

Twitter Tools

• Search.Twitter.com is Twitter’s native search engine; use it to find out how much you or your competitors are being discussed on Twitter. Using tools like Hootsuite you can now access Search.Twitter through the dashboards.
• For charts showing how many users are following you (or your competitors) over time check out TwitterCounter.
• If you are trying to keep your ratio of Following to Followers in check, use FriendorFollow to find out which of those you are following are not returning the favor.
• If you are seeking to find influencers on Twitter (users with lots o’ followers), TweepSearch is a great place to start.
• MrTweet connects you with others on Twitter based on interests and industries
• Twitpic allows you to upload pics with your tweets (and we all like pictures!)
• Everythingtwitter is well… I guess the names says it all

Call Tracking Tools

Your web site should use dedicated numbers that allow you to track the source of inbound calls.  Two vendors we’ve used are Voice Star and Mongoose Metrics.  Both allow you to track the source and duration of inbound calls at a relatively low price.

Campaign and Social Media Measurement

If you’re seeking to answers on how to measure the impact of online media (Paid, Owned and Earned) you should visit us at EncoreMetrics.com.  All we do is media measurement and attribution; and we do it very well.

Miscellaneous Wrapping this up, I’ll recommend Wordle as a fun, yet practical, app you can use.  Wordle creates wordclouds in a variety of formats. Here’s one I created using the copy from this blog pos5. Enjoy!

Again, this is not intended to be the all-encompassing New Media Toolkit, and I’m sure there are many great tools that were overlooked.  That said, I hope these are helpful in becoming a more prolific online marketer.  Please feel free to COMMENT, SHARE with others and SUBSCRIBE to our blog. We look forward to your feedback!

Steve Latham (follow me on Twitter)

In most companies, silos exist throughout the organization.  Unless you’re a 5-person shop, you likely have departments that perform specific functions that allow the company to operate.  While this may be an organizational requirement, departments don’t have to become silos where there is very little collaboration, interaction and integrated planning, execution and management.  Even if you’re in the same department, silos often exist among and between different disciplines.  When it comes to marketing, there are often noticeable disconnects between planning, communications, PR, creative, media, direct marketing, digital and other specialties.  As the title to this blog suggests, I believe Silos belong are farms, not in marketing departments.

Brands must take an integrated approach that starts with a deep understanding of their audiences and objectives, and incorporates each medium that may be effectively utilized to reach and engage customers. In the digital realm we’re talking about display advertising, demand generation, paid search, natural search, email marketing,  social media and mobile marketing.  As there is no silver bullet in marketing, you have to take an integrated approach. Allocating budget and assigning responsibility is a good start, but without integrated planning, management and reporting, you might as well be living on a farm.

Earlier this year I moderated a panel discussion at the Online Marketing Summit on “Integrating Your Marketing Mix”. While it may not be the sexiest topic (the Twitter session next door had many more attendees), it is a very important topic and is a common challenge faced by marketing executives today.  I’ll address it by tackling the two big questions: what to integrate and how to do it.

What To Integrate?
I think you have to look at integration at two different levels.  Before you try to integrate your broadcast, print, direct mail, digital and other channels, you should integrate those activities that take place within each discipline.  Many consider “digital” or “interactive” as a stand-alone marketing discipline, when in fact is a collection of sub-specialties are that are quite different, yet inter-related.  Because they each require unique skills and experience, there are often internal and external chasms between web design, development, paid search, natural search, display media, email, social media and mobile, not to mention analytics and measurement.  Because each discipline requires specialized knowledge, it’s common that a brand will have one agency for paid search, another for natural search, another for display media, and others for email marketing, social media and mobile marketing.  Before you start trying to get traditional and digital to work together, you need to make sure your interactive specialists are all on the same page.  Once you have integrated digital planning, execution and measurement, you have a much better chance of winning the battle to integrate traditional and digital marketing efforts.

How to Integrate?
While there is no silver bullet for integrating business activities and operations, I can share a few thoughts that may be of help.  First, I am not an advocate of selecting one group or agency that can handle every one of your needs.  There are simply too many disciplines and all of them require deep knowledge and experience to make them work effectively.  No one agency can be great at everything. If you want the best in the disciplines that matter, you are often forced to cobble together a network of partners to achieve it.  In these situations, you can realize significant benefits by doing the following:

1. Integrate reporting and measurement – even if you use different resources (people, agencies, etc.) you can still standardize how results are tracked, reported and analyzed across channels.  Rather than receiving one report from your paid search firm, another from your display media agency, and yet more from your SEO, Social and Email partners, take some time up front to define the key performance indicators for each channel. Then require each partner to provide the information you need in a common format.  As it relates to digital marketing, you should standardize on one reporting platform that will be used to measure impact of your search, display, email and social media.  When it comes to reporting, less is more!

2. Integrate planning – once your strategic objectives are defined, ask each of your partners to create a plan that will help you achieve those objectives.  Give them a common framework (planning template) so each partner’s deliverables are consistent.  Then host a planning meeting in which all partners are invited to present their plan to the group.  Once the plans are presented, discuss them as a group with the goal of identifying where coordination, collaboration and knowledge sharing between and among your partners are required.

• Case study: one of our clients hosted such an event and we found it to be very worthwhile.  Not only did we learn what the other groups were working on, but we also identified common challenges and solutions that could be leveraged across disciplines.  Most importantly, we realized there were many inter-dependencies between our groups, and that we all stood to benefit if we worked together and coordinated our efforts.  It was very eye-opening for us but no one benefited more than the client.

3. Integrate Execution – while integrated planning is a great start, the true value is realized through integrated execution. If you are a brand marketer, you need to do more than suggest that your team and/or agencies work together; you need to facilitate it to ensure follow through.  If you need an example of how to do this, look no further than the funny guy with the big head: Jack.

• Case study: At the OMS panel mentioned above, Maria Brusaschetti, Media Manager for Jack In The Box, discussed how JITB not only encourages its agencies to work together – they require it.  They host all-hands planning meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page.  To ensure collaboration and cooperation, they tie agency compensation to feedback from peer surveys (yes, they survey their partners to find out how well their peers are cooperating).  If the agencies want to earn their bonus, they have to play nice with others.  I think this is a brilliant approach that can be also be implemented inside your organization.  If you want your departments to work together, offer the department heads monetary (and non-monetary) incentives to ensure interdepartmental cooperation.  Then make sure you follow through with execution.

In closing, integration is not a one-time fix.  As our organizations evolve, the ways in which we work together will evolve as well.  While mastering integration is far from easy, it can yield invaluable insights, efficiencies and synergy.  Or you can put on your overalls and fire up your John Deere.  The choice is yours!

Steve Latham
@stevelatham

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For 2+ years I’ve been advising clients on how to use Twitter as a marketing platform.  Surprisingly, it seems that most brand marketers still don’t get it.  With the goal of doing my part to help the industry master this channel, I’m sharing my best practices for Twitter Marketing.  While these may not be comprehensive, they will provide you with 90% of what you need to be proficient at building your brand via Twitter.  In order of priority – here is my list. Enjoy!

Twitter Best Practices for Social Media Marketing (according to @stevelatham)

1. Brand Your Profile
Before you start tweeting, make sure your profile is appropriately branded.  Update your profile, including a tight summary of who you are and how you distinguish yourself.  Include your URL and use a pic that can be identified when viewing a stream on a mobile device.  You can now find personalized Twitter backgrounds for cheap so there’s no excuse not to have one (see ours here).

2.  Provide Interesting and Engaging Content
While Tweeting is easy, it’s important that you do it right, starting with a solid content strategy.  Content recommendations include:

• Based on approved content guidelines, create Tweets that are engaging and relevant to target audiences.  It should be easy for potential followers to see that your tweets are valuable and worth reading.
• Introduce your content.  People often provide links to articles without any explanation as to why it might be relevant to the reader.  I always try to provide my take on whatever it is I’m linking to.  I’d recommend you do the same.
• Write tweets that will be shared.  Rather than simply posting links, introduce links with compelling copy that encourage clicks.
• Allow time to pass between each tweet (at least 15 minutes) for several reasons: 1) no one likes to have their dashboard of tweets dominated by one account, 2) if someone is not watching they are likely to miss them, 3) spreading them out demonstrates consistency that yields brand benefits.
• Limit Tweets to 120 characters so they can be easily re-tweeted without exceeding the 140-character limit. See “120 is the new 140″ from @BrianSolis for more tips.
• Leverage real-time search by prominently including buzzwords that will picked up by Google, Bing and other search engines.
• For more on Content Marketing check out @juntajoe and his blog.

3. Remember! Engagement = Listening + Responding
Social media is about interacting, and you can’t do that if you’re not listening.  In addition to listening for your brand mentions, you need to keep an eyes on what your network is tweeting about and participate in the discussion.  Here are some tips:

• Use tools to track when your profile or brand is being mentioned on Twitter.  Tools include www.Search.Twitter.com as well as the SM monitoring tools mentioned previously.
• Use the native search feature in your Twitter management tool to follow topics that are of importance to you.  For example, I have a search column in Hootsuite for “Social Media Strategy“.  This is how I keep up to date on the latest tweets on this subject.
• When your brand is being mentioned in a positive way, RT the message, follow and recognize the person who tweeted about you.
• Acknowledge mentions.  Monitor when your Twitter account name is mentioned and RT to thank, and/or acknowledge those who are mentioning you.
• Build credibility and goodwill with your followers by re-tweeting (RT) posts that will be of interest to your audiences.  If you RT a follower’s post, they may acknowledge the RT to their followers, thereby promoting you in the process.

When your brand is being mentioned in a negative way, you can either 1) respond, or 2) ignore it.  If you choose to reply, consider the risks, given the nature of their tweet, their motives and their objectives. A confrontational response is rarely successful.  If you want to address a customer complaint, ask them follow you so you can then send a DM and take the conversation offline.  As mentioned above, ignoring the mention is often best.  You can inadvertently cause much greater damage if you engage in a public scuffle with a crazy person.

4. Building a network of followers
Without a network there is no reach, and without reach there is no ROI.  Contrary to most hopes and beliefs, networks do not build themselves; if you want followers, you have to work on it.  The good news is that with Twitter, the process is relatively easy.  When you follow someone, they will receive an email notification.  Currently, the normal etiquette is to respond by following the person who followed you.  Judicious tweeters will read your latest tweets to determine if your content is worth following.  If the content is good, most will follow you back – at least for a while.

• Start with your own employees, partners, vendors and community.  Announce your new Twitter account and ask employees to follow and share with others.
• Identify the top 50 influencers in your category on Twitter as these people can provide visibility and credibility for your brand among their networks of followers. Use www.TweepSearch.com, www.MrTweet.com and www.Twollow.com to find users with shared interests.  Look for those who have large numbers followers and are active in sharing their opinions with the masses (aka influencers).
• Follow people who follow your Influencers.
• Include a link to your twitter account in email, on your site, on all social networking sites and in all correspondence.
• Remember to maintain a favorable ratio of Following / Followers of +/- 1:1. While building your network, take time to check out who you are following that is not following you back at www.FriendorFollow.com.  For each person who is not following you, you can either: 1) stop following for good, or 2) unfollow and then re-follow.  If they do not respond on your 2^nd attempt to reach out, you may consider unfollowing them for good.
• Be careful with TwitterBots (AutoFollow) tools.  As you’ll quickly learn, building a network takes time.  If you are interested in using an network-building service, make sure  you use a credible tool or service that follows Twitter best practices. Failure to do so will result in suspension of your account.  While there are a lot of cheap bots that to avoid, there are some services that work (full disclosure: we offer one that works well).  Before you buy, do your homework and ask for references.

5. Managing Multiple Accounts
Many marketers maintain at least two types of Twitter accounts – one for their company and one for their personal tweets.   Twitter management tools (my favorite is HootSuite) allow you to manage multiple profiles.  Since many may follow your personal and work accounts, make sure you don’t tweet the same content at the same time.  Another common practice is to RT your company tweets from your personal account.  Remember that many will follow your brand and personal profiles, so make sure you space them out (no simultaneous tweeting!).

Common Twitter Mistakes to Avoid
Here are some common content mistakes many marketers make when Tweeting:

• It’s all about me!!!  Too many still use social media a megaphone vs. a telephone.  Success requires that you listen, engage and interact with others in the community.
• Using social media as a press release distribution platform.  While there are sites that are great for press releases, this should be the exception, not the norm.  As noted, conversations require an exchange of information.  If all you do it tell the world about your firm, audiences will grow tired of listening.
• Boring content.  You should always seek to include and introduce links to video, articles, audio and other media that will be interesting to audiences.
• Vague content. Doesn’t it bug you when someone posts a link with a cryptic introduction?  Make it easy for followers to see what you are presenting to them.  Introduce your links.
• Sharing information that is confidential, sensitive or not appropriate.  This is especially important if you work for a public company or in a regulated, hyper-competitive or litigious industry.
• Drawing unnecessary attention or being overly defensive when addressing negative comments.  Sometimes it’s best to ignore the haters.  If you respond, you may make something big out of a small issue, which may be exactly what they want you to do.

In Closing…
Again, this may not be all-encompassing, and I’m sure I’ve omitted a few important lessons.  That said, I hope these are helpful and that you find value in them.  If so, please COMMENT, SHARE and SUBSCRIBE to our blog.  Thank you for your feedback!

Steve Latham (follow me on Twitter)

This evening a friend asked me how to post a Presentation on your facebook profile.  I thought it might make for an informative post, so here’s what I told her:

1. Go to Slideshare and create an account.  Slideshare is like Youtube for Powerpoint – a great platform for sharing all types of content.

2. Upload your presentation to your slideshare account (it’s pretty easy – just click “upload” and follow instructions)

3. Once uploaded, copy the link to your presentation and post it in your FB wall post.  I recommend you first shorten the URL using Bit.ly or om.ly so it’s shorter, less likely to break, and you can track click-throughs to the presentation.

4. For permanent posting, add the Slideshare App to your Facebook account. This will allow synch with your presentations on Slideshare and present them inside the Slideshare tab on your profile.  For an example, see my Slideshare tab.

I hope this is helpful.  If so – feel free to share with others!

Steve Latham
Follow me!

This morning I read a Smartblogs article on Social Media and Cause Marketing.  It correctly points out that social media is an ideal platform for corporate cause marketing programs, and provides some useful tips for success.  Definitely worth a quick read!

I’m a huge fan of using social media for cause marketing, and I believe social media has probably been the single biggest contributor to the resurgence of cause marketing campaigns (no data, just a hunch).  But as I read the article, I reflected on numerous conversations I’ve had with big brand clients who love the idea of using social media as a platform for a brand-building, cause-marketing campaign, but are unable to pursue it.

One issue that often surfaces is that within large companies the online marketing, brand management and direct response groups are completely disconnected from community relations and corporate giving groups.  The wall that exists between corporate giving and marketing is often quite high.  Marketers are typically restricted from supporting charitable organizations (through a cause marketing campaign) that are not already approved and ordained as “causes we officially support.”  If they go to the corporate giving department with a social media marketing idea, they are often rebuffed with a “thanks but no thanks – we’ve got it covered” mentality.  If you can get past the empire building and actually get the departments to work together, you’ll still have to deal with a lot of red tape and slow progress.  With the increasing pressure to deliver compelling results in a timely manner, “lengthy approval process” usually means “pass!”.

So while social media is the ideal medium for promoting a cause marketing effort, unless it bubbles up inside of the community relations department, great marketing / giving opportunities often die on the whiteboard due to politics and organizational dysfunction. It’s quite a shame.

That said, there are still many examples of companies that are doing it well.  I just hope we start to see more of them!

Please feel free to COMMENT, SHARE with others and SUBSCRIBE to our blog. We look forward to your feedback!

Steve Latham (follow me on Twitter)

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