Now that initiatives have been in market, any reasonable business manager would expect to see program results. However, quantified results in social business and brands willing to stand behind them are difficult to find. But the truth is out there…and here are 101 examples of social business return on investment, roughly 60% revenue generation and 40% cost reduction. Each example lists brand, activity, and source + year.

1. Aflac. Community drove online payments increase of 3% led to $95,000 in savings. (Lithium Technologies, 2011)
2. Alberta Common Wealth Credit Union. Blog, YouTube, Facebook – 2 million impressions, 2,300 new accounts, and $4 million Canadian in new deposits. (Forrester, 2008)
3. AT&T. Community: 21,000 customer issues resolved, driving 16% improvement in call deflections year/year. (Lithium Technologies, 2011)
4. Audi. Audi A1 Community: Almost 40,000 people created customized versions of the new model. In total 5.5 million people visited the microsite 119 million times. And the company reports that this program helped generate the largest number of car pre-orders in its history. (Forrester, 2010)
5. Bank of America. Community drove High School segment sales increased 40 percent from 2008 – 2009; portfolio mix of high school students increased by 27 percent. (Communispace, 2010)
6. Benefit Cosmetics. Customer generated content drives 10X click-thru rate on “Buy Now” button. (Bazaarvoice, 2011)
7. Best Buy. Community generates $5M value in annual support savings and sales advocacy. (Lithium Technologies, 2011)
8. Blendtec. Viral videos increased company sales +700%. (Barnraisers, 2010)
9. Bonobos. 13 times more cost effective (CPA) to acquire a new customer from Twitter than from other marketing channels. (Twitter, 2011)
10. Bonobos. Exclusive sale on Twitter generated 1,200% ROI in 24 hours on promoted tweet. (Twitter, 2011)
11. Bupa. Community drove £190,000 savings through collaboration, online events. (Jive Software, 2011)
12. Burberry. Social microsites secured 1,000,000 fans and a 10% increase in same-store sales. (Barnraisers, 2010)
13. Burger King. Subservient Chicken video increased chicken sandwich sales 9% per week a month after launch. (Adweek, 2005)
14. CDW. Online community member Net Promoter Score 4x average and saved an estimated $4 million. (Communispace, 2007)
15. Cerner. Community resulted in 13% fewer customer support issues logged. (Jive Software, 2011)
16. Cerner. Community resulted in 70% decrease in internal HR issues logged. (Jive Software, 2011)
17. Cerner. Community resulted in shorter approval cycles for writing technical documentation, from 2-6 weeks to hours or days. (Jive Software, 2011)
18. Charles Schwab. Customer referrals drive 40% of new customers for Charles Schwab (ratings & reviews). (Bazaarvoice, 2011)
19. Charles Schwab. Online community drives 56% increase in Gen X customer base versus year ago. (Communispace, 2007)
20. Cisco. Community deflects 120,000 support cases each month. (Lithium Technologies, 2011)
21. ConAgra Foods. Online community insights-based events produce a 24% higher gross margin ROI for retailers than other events. (Communispace, 2010)
22. Dell. @DellOutlet on Twitter generated $2 million direct sales, influenced $1 million addt’l (2007 – 2009). (Direct2Dell Blog, 2009)
23. Domino’s Pizza. Foursquare drove 29% pre-tax profit through promotions. (Barnraisers, 2010)
24. Electronic Arts. EA was 2nd UK brand to use promoted tweets and trends to promote FIFA 12 video game. Trend engagement level was 11%, well above Twitter’s average ‘benchmark’ for trends, of 3% to 6%. Promoted tweet engagement averaged 8.3% over two-week campaign vs. Twitter benchmark of 1.5%. (Marketing Magazine, 2011)
25. Elsevier. Wiki drives 80% reduction in interdepartmental e-mail volume. (Socialtext, unkn)
26. Epson. Visitors interacting with reviews are 67% more likely to convert and have 25% higher average order value. (Bazaarvoice, 2010)
27. Epson. Reviews drove 98% higher revenue per visitor for Epson. (Bazaarvoice, 2011)
28. FICO. Community: 850k customers served, resulting in 10% improvement in call deflections annually. (Lithium Technologies, 2011)
29. FICO. By year three, forum members spend 41% more on products. (Lithium Technologies, 2011)
30. FONA International. Wiki eliminated almost 50,000 e-mails a year from one specific process. (Socialtext, unkn)
31. Ford. Fiesta Movement WOM campaign: 31,000 pieces of original Fiesta content and 10,000 online vehicle reservations. (WPP Team Detroit, 2010)
32. giffgaff. 100% of questions answered by community members in average time of 93 seconds. (Lithium Technologies, 2011)
33. Gilt Groupe. Online community insights drove 10% increase in shopping cart conversion and a five-point increase in Point-of-Sale Net Promoter Score. (Communispace, 2011)
34. Hershey’s. House party: 10,000 parties, reached 129,000 people, and say their campaign was seen by 7 million people. (Forrester, 2008)
35. Honda. Friending Honda campaign increased Facebook fans from 15k to 422k, generated over 3,500 dealer quote requests. (RPA, 2010)
36. HP. More than 4.6 people have told HP that the forum solved their support issues, which HP says makes customer happier and saves the company millions in support costs. (Forrester, 2010)
37. IBM. developerWorks community saves $100 million annually from people who use this resource instead of contacting IBM support. (Forrester, 2010)
38. IHG. Saved the costs of stock footage or original photography and agency fees by using community member photos. (Communispace, 2009)
39. Indium. Company blogs increased B2B leads, prospects, conversions and sales by double digits. (Barnraisers, 2010)
40. Intuit. Internal collaboration platform: New ideas at Intuit now get to market in an average of 5 months, vs. 13 months previously. (Forrester, 2010)
41. Intuit Quickbooks. Business owners engaged with rated ProAdvisors 555% more often than unrated counterparts. (ratings and reviews). (Bazaarvoice, 2011)
42. Jewelry TV. Reviews drive a 151% lift in site conversion for Jewelry TV. (Bazaarvoice, 2011)
43. Jewelry TV. Average order value increased 25% when reviews were present (ratings and reviews). (Bazaarvoice, 2011)
44. Jewelry TV. Customer reviews boost mobile sales by 30% (ratings and reviews). (Bazaarvoice, 2011)
45. Justin Boots. Exceeded sales goal for new product line by 30 percent, 95% of sales from social media marketing. (Social Media Explorer, 2010)
46. Kiddicare. 30% reduction in inbound customer communications and first call resolution increased from 60% to 98% via sCRM solution. (GetSatisfaction, unkn)
47. Kotex. 1.7 million Web site visits, 17,500 tweets about Kotex, 25,000 Kotex discussions in the social space generating 88.5 million impressions, a million girls “activated” on the brand site, 93,000 Likes, and 640 million impressions in major print, broadcast, and online channels. 750,000 people requested samples and these converted at a 42% rate. (Forrester, 2010)
48. L’Oreal. Facebook tools for local salons drive incremental $4,000 via program. (Mediapost, 2011)
49. La-Z-Boy. La-Z-Boy captures 13,000 new leads with comfort stories campaign. (Bazaarvoice, 2011)
50. LendingTree. LendingTree users start the loan process 83% more often when reviews are present. (Bazaarvoice, 2011)
51. Logitech. Bowiechick “Breakup” video on YouTube doubles Logitech webcam sales on Amazon.com. (CBS Evening News, 2009)
52. Mattel. Despite product recalls, online community helped support Q4 2007 sales increase of 6%. (Forrester, 2008)
53. Microsoft. House parties: 40,000 in 12 countries played a role in 3.4 million software purchases. (Forrester, 2010)
54. Mint. 75% reduction in number of support tickets via sCRM solution. (GetSatisfaction, unkn)
55. Movistar. Community delivers $5.75m in call deflection savings annually. (Lithium Technologies, 2011)
56. National Instruments. Community resulted in 46% of all support questions answered by peers instead of support. (Jive Software, 2011)
57. NetApp. The NetApp community has impacted $500 million in sales and drives 28% of all NetApp web traffic. (Jive Software, 2011)
58. Old Spice. Old Spice guy Isaiah Mustafa commercials and YouTube responses increase web traffic 300% and contributed to a 106% year/year sales increase for the month. (Ad Age, 2010)
59. Orange. Listening: saved a few million euros in support costs and helped avoid several potential PR problems. (Forrester, 2010)
60. Paramount Pictures. #Super8Secret Promoted Trend created a tremendous spike in conversations: Tweets of the hashtag reached nearly nine million impressions in less than 24 hours and mentions of the movie skyrocketed to more than 150 per minute. Receipts for the sneak preview exceeded $1 million, and Paramount said weekend box office surpassed expectations by 52%. (Twitter, 2011)
61. Petco. Products with reviews decrease return rate by 20%. (Bazaarvoice, 2011)
62. Petco. 1% of shoppers use “Ask and Answer,” influencing 10% of revenue on website. (Altimeter Group, 2011)
63. Petco. Q&A content powers 75% more sales; 100% more orders per session; 28% more items per order; 9% higher average order value. (Bazaarvoice, 2011)
64. Precyse Technologies. $250,000 savings in crowdsourcing new product design. (InnoCentive, 2010)
65. Premier Farnell. Community drives a 3% purchase conversion rate. (Jive Software, 2011)
66. Rhapsody. 50% decrease in support costs and 53% decrease in weekly support contacts via sCRM solution. (GetSatisfaction, unkn)
67. Rubbermaid. Online sales of new products spike 21% with video reviews. (Bazaarvoice, 2011)
68. Sage Software. Community drove a +20 NPS increase. (Lithium Technologies, 2011)
69. SAP. Community resulted in a 15% reduction in product release cycles. (Jive Software, 2011)
70. SAP. Community drive 5% increase in partner sales. (Jive Software, 2011)
71. SAP. Community resulted in over 90 ideas delivered or in product development. (Jive Software, 2011)
72. Scholastic. Online community insights resulted in a 3% lift in sales for test marketing message. (Communispace, 2008)
73. Scotiabank. Community eliminated over 300 intranet sites as well as the need to build new sites. (Jive Software, 2011)
74. Secret. Among women viewing the video, 57% said their impression of the Secret brand improved and purchase intent among women who participated on Facebook went up by 11% (33% for teens). Clinical sales increased 8% despite a 70% decrease in TV support. (Forrester, 2010)
75. Sephora. Community users spend 2.5x more than average customers, superfans spend 10x more. (Lithium Technologies, 2011)
76. Spiceworks. Community members have produced more than 25,000 product reviews and over 100,000 discussions. (Forrester, 2010)
77. Sprint. Brand monitoring helped uncover conversation insights to drive campaign messaging changes, resulting in $133m in additional revenue. (MotiveQuest, 2011).
78. Starbucks. 75,000 product and service ideas suggested. (Forrester, 2008)
79. StrongMail. Migrated support calls to online community, reducing call volume by 50%. (Jive Software, 2011)
80. Subaru. Online community – 68% of respondents said they were “much” or “somewhat” more likely to purchase post-project. (Communispace, 2008)
81. Swiss Re. Community paid for itself in less than 12 months by decommissioning legacy systems. (Jive Software, 2011)
82. T Mobile. Employees have reduced sales & service product training from 1.5 hour sessions to 15 minutes. (Jive Software, 2011)
83. TechSmith. Saved about $100,000 annually in staffing costs via sCRM solution. (GetSatisfaction, unkn)
84. TomTom. In one month, community handled 20,000 cases resulting in $150k of savings. (Lithium Technologies, 2011)
85. Toshiba. Saved $213,000 by adding online component to 5 events, doubling attendance. (Jive Software, 2011)
86. Toshiba. Community helps new sales reps and dealers reach six-month sales goals in four months, increasing sales revenue attainment by 30%. (Jive Software, 2011)
87. Toshiba. Retention rates for sales reps has increased 13% since using community. (Jive Software, 2011)
88. TransUnion. Estimated $2.5 million in savings in less than five months while spending about $50,000 on a social networking platform. (Socialtext, 2009)
89. Travelocity. Travelocity gnome on Chatroulette – 40 days, 350,000 impressions and 400 prospect conversations. (ClickZ, 2010)
90. TurboTax. 71% likelihood of customers interacting with @TeamTurboTax (Twitter support) to recommend TurboTax. (CoTweet, 2010)
91. TurboTax. Yahoo Answers: 58% higher engagement rate than people coming in from other channels. (Forrester, 2010)
92. TVG. Community members spend 36% more than average. (Lithium Technologies, 2011)
93. UBM. Community allows for collaboration, saving $20,000 and more. (Jive Software, 2011)
94. UBM. Community reduced time from 3 days to 30 minutes for key sales information. (Jive Software, 2011)
95. University of London. Internal social network allows students to collaborate remotely, expected to deliver future savings in the region of £300,000 per year in print, courier and administration costs alone. (IBM, 2008)
96. UPS. POPURLs dashboard: 32,000 video views, 25% regular return visits to the site, and average of almost seven minutes spent on the site per visit. (Forrester, 2010)
97. USAA. USAA saw online account initiation increase by almost 16,000 new accounts across the five product categories the first year with Bazaarvoice. (ratings and reviews). (Bazaarvoice, 2011)
98. Virgin America. Exclusive flash sale on Twitter raised the maximum $50,000 in charitable donations for Stand Up To Cancer. It was also one of the top five sale days ever for the airline. (Twitter, 2011)
99. Virgin America. Exclusive flash sale on Twitter drove 25% increase in sign-ups over the previous week to Elevate, Virgin America’s loyalty program. (Twitter, 2011)
100. Vistaprint. Community tracked $30,000 in social revenue in 2009. (Lithium Technologies, 2011)
101. Yum Brands. Community helped new product launch internationally in 4 months instead of 18. (Jive Software, 2011)

Thanks in particular to Katy Keim and Paul Gilliham at Lithium, Gia Lyons at Jive, and Erin Nelson at Bazaarvoice for helping source much of this information.

For the rest of us who aren’t there yet, major change is still evident: The Web itself has become pervasively social as we’ve changed both the behavior and expectations of our private lives around so many of the ways that we relate to one another. This includes how much (more) we share information now, actively try to build social capital and our personal brands, as well as how we value others. But make no mistake, we are each still learning much about our newfound ability to directly influence the entire world from our tiny corner of it. The incredible leverage that each of us now possesses in the form of social tools is one of the most potent forces in the modern world.

If the pen was mightier than the sword, social computing is perhaps on an entirely new plane of existence. It has been used in everything from the real-time coordination of escape from natural disaster to permanently archiving genocide so that the perpetrators are held accountable. For businesses, it has revolutionized everything from product design and customer service, to operations.

By a good many measures, the writing is now clearly on the wall about what is happening today: With the data showing, for example, that the reign of e-mail is already over in the consumer world, can (and should) businesses be far behind? In fact, this year we are seeing the broadest changes yet in the way that social tools are being applied to business problems. While social media marketing and customer communities continue to be very hot topics in enterprise social computing, the discussion (and real-world practice) has evolved well beyond these initial activities that were common early adoption focus areas. Organizations are beginning to more deeply understand the ramifications of a highly social enterprise environment and they are beginning to see evidence that their efforts are actually fragmented elements of a bigger picture.

Social Computing + Business = Value Creation

For its part, the business world has begun to wake up to the transformation that is now happening all around it. Decision makers are now carefully weighing the potential benefits of transformation to new modes of work, with the costs and perceived risks. Many of the early social computing efforts that took place in many organizations have gone on to either 1) encountering some of the travails and benefits of genuine change or 2) learning enormously important lessons as they evolve and mature, or both. More importantly, there is now a sober realization that these early experiments and initiatives must turn into serious endeavors that produce results that scale and produce abundant business value. This is not not due to a sense of justifying the work already done, but that the full ramifications of social computing has increasingly serious competitive ramifications.

But the job of aligning an organization with social computing is not an easy one, if it ever was.

Consider the following scenario: You are tasked with sorting out, reconciling, and making sense of your various social computing efforts. You will typically have several online communities, a massive Sharepoint implementation, both a Facebook and Twitter engagement effort, an internal social network, several crowdsourcing projects, a microblogging platform, and multiple social media marketing efforts. All of them engage the same three audiences: customers, partners, and/or workers. But all of them have different owners, strategies, tools, teams, policies, standards, goals, and priorities. Most of them overlap in some way. The solution probably isn’t to combine them. (Not only do legacy efforts add challenge, but the most transformative phase of social computing transformation often isn’t represented by them.)

A better solution is to understand and manage them strategically using a consistent and cohesive approach. And one that doesn’t treat each one in isolation, for they are mostly aspects of the same thing: The intentional creation of a dynamic business culture that directly empowers all of its constituents to better create and exchange value.

I would put forth that it is having both consistency and a cohesive approach towards this goal that organizations are beginning to realize they are lacking. Without it, there is considerable likelihood that you’ll leave much of the potential value untapped and lose the opportunity for market leadership in your industry. As we are starting to see, the big picture here is much more than (just) team collaboration or incremental improvements to the way we market our products or provide customer service. There are order-of-magnitude operational business improvements to be had that will change the very way we run our businesses in the process.

As I explored in detail recently, this bigger picture is increasingly being called Social Business, and consists of the various threads of effort that business have gone through over the last half-decade, such as online communities, Web 2.0, Social Media, crowdsourcing, Enterprise 2.0, and Social CRM.

The Five Value Propositions for Social Business

To address the eponymous title of this post however, let’s ask what, specifically is the value that Social Business provides as a meaningful and enterprise-class framework for social computing:

1. Identification of the fundamental archetypes. What are the essential aspects one must cultivate for a successful Social Business effort, whatever the audience, mode of interaction, tools, etc? In our view, there are four classic archetypes. These are:
   • Dynamic Signal, which represents real-time social interactions and analysis like posts, Tweets, activity streams, feeds, aggregators, etc,
   • Ecosystem, all the functioning elements of a functioning Social Business environment
   • Metafilter, the ability to connect the right information in the ecosystem with the right audience, when it’s needed, and;
   • Hivemind, the collective awareness and intelligence of a Social Business community both in its totality (all participants, everywhere) and all constituent subgroups.
2. Consistency and cohesion across Social Business strategy and implementation(s). While Social Business will always manifest itself as many individual efforts in an organization, now there is a way to attain intellectual and business mastery of the forces and their orchestration at a management level. Social CRM and online communities facing the public are indeed different from internal Enterprise 2.0 collaboration efforts, but not only do the archetypes begin to reveal their core commonality, they allow them to be treated the same way when it comes to building shared value, extracting knowledge, and operationalizing the results as part of the business. They can often be a primary revenue generator in their own right.
3. Cost savings and efficiencies. While many organizations are already understanding the business value of factoring out commonalities and centralizing them, it’s been hard to do up until now until the larger picture was well understood. This is now starting to be possible in a significant way with Social Business, from social media policy to community management.
4. Repeatability and lower barriers to adoption. Different parts of the organization don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel with their Social Business transformation, but can build upon much of the strategy and implementation work that has come before it.
5. High success rates and lower risk profile Because much of the work around issues involving legal, HR, branding, governance, and other horizontal business concerns are addressed broadly and up front, Social Business efforts will have better chance of a high value, high scale outcome with less risk.

I’ll be exploring Social Business in-depth this year here and elsewhere as the concept continues to mature. Please contribute your thoughts below along with any concerns about yet another term for what we previously termed Web 2.0, social media, etc. Now is the time to discuss how all of this is becoming a standard way of doing business in our organizations. You can also read our white paper on Social Business Design.

Put another way, Intuit treats their customer community as a strategic asset and not some strange non-core element of their business.  Like all other business assets, social initiatives must have a role in strategic planning and ultimately contribute measurable value to the business. Intuit has succeeded by framing social media in the context of existing business functions like customer research and product development. In doing so they’ve not only wrapped their arms around social media, they’ve also accomplished something rather unique – they can prove social is good for their business.

Christine’s presentation traced the evolution of Intuit’s product and customer research efforts from a program of visits to customer homes and businesses (called a “follow me home”) to a world of online community and embedded social functionality. Positioning social inside this framework accomplishes two things. First, it places social media on the leading edge of an existing continuum of tried and true customer research methods. Second, it allows Intuit to measure the outcome of social initiatives with existing metrics. The result is a targeted approach to social business that fits naturally into an existing way of looking at business assets.

The outcomes speak for themselves:

• Members of the Intuit community offer effective customer service at almost no cost to the company (the most active community member has addressed more than 50,000 tax questions).
• Calls-to-action are broadcast to users’ social graphs, but originating inside Intuit software, drive 30% more conversions than traditional advertising.
• A private customer community has generated more than $10 million in new revenue for the company.

Measurable wins like these illustrate that true business value is realized when customer community is treated as a business asset and not an experimental campaign.

The industry in which he worked was very social and every day many new agencies from around the world gave him a call. One day an agency came calling and let everyone know they were social media gurus and could build the best campaign anyone had ever dreamed of. Moreover, these campaigns used social media and people who questioned their value were clearly not meant to be in marketing or management.

“I need to get me one of those,” thought the marketer. “If I can shift my budget out of traditional channels and get my customers to start selling to each other through viral marketing, I’ll be a hero.” And he awarded a huge project in advance to the gurus so they could get started right away. They set up a Twitter account and a Facebook group and seemed to be hard at work. They asked for an espresso machine and gluten-free snacks to keep them going and found users to follow and friend late into the night.

“I wonder how the campaign is coming along,” thought the marketer. But he felt a bit nervous when he remembered that people who weren’t qualified to be marketers wouldn’t “get it.” Personally, he thought he was in the know, but thought it’d be a good idea to test someone else instead.

“I’ll send my direct marketing specialist to see the gurus,” thought the marketer. “She’s a no-nonsense professional and knows how campaigns work.”

The direct marketer went into the conference room where the gurus sat surfing away on their netbooks. “OMG!” she thought and opened her eyes wide, “This all looks like spam to me,” but she did not say so. The gurus asked her to click around a bit more and asked if she could see the authority and influence that would be created. The marketer tried her best but couldn’t determine where any value existed. “Oh dear,” she thought, “what am I missing? I must be too old to understand! No, I can’t let anyone say I don’t get it.”

“What do you think?” said one of the gurus, while he clicked on a profile picture.

“Oh, we are certainly innovating here,” replied the direct marketer. “I’ll tell my boss that we are really driving the engagement with these initiatives.”

Now the gurus asked for more money, which they required for HD Flip cams, Bluetooth headsets, and an iPhone app, which they would need to take the campaign to the next level. They used these for their personal blogs, but they continued to chat with people through the Twitter account and on the Facebook group wall.

Soon afterwards, the marketer sent his web analytics guy to see the gurus and ask if the campaign would be ready for launch soon. Like the direct marketer, he couldn’t find any direct connection to value, either.

“Isn’t this a real early adopter methodology?” asked the gurus, showing screengrabs of the social media accounts.

“I’m from the digital world,” said the web analytics guy. “So it’s strange that I’m not getting it and I can’t let anyone know.” He told the gurus that the developing campaign was “killer.” “Definitely cutting edge,” he told the marketing chief.

Everyone in the department talked about the campaign and finally the marketer wanted a walkthrough himself, while it was still in beta. With his team, including the two who had seen the campaign at earlier stages, they went to visit the gurus.

“Isn’t it great?” said the two marketing specialists who had been there before. “You can see where customers will talk to us and we will be able to listen.” And they moused over the @username section of the site.

“WTF?” thought the marketer, “I don’t get it. Am I just a pointy haired boss? Do I still have what it takes to be a marketer in the 21st century?”

“Seriously,” he said to the gurus, “this will win us a lion, pencil, and a webby.” And the marketer’s entire department nodded their heads and advised him to shift his entire budget out of traditional channels in advance of a new product launch that was soon to take place. The gurus were put on retainer, made agency of record, and appointed “social media experts.”

The week leading up to the campaign and product launch, the gurus pulled several all-nighters, going through a case of Red Bull. People should see that they were having a sprint to the finish. They finally stepped away from their computers and sighed, “the campaign is ready for launch.”

The marketer and his entire department gathered in the boardroom; the gurus clicked through sites and said: “This is the YouTube account!” “This is the influencer outreach program!” and “Here are the Google Alerts!” and so on. “They are built on real customer relationships that could never have been created before; that’s the beauty of social media.”

“+1!” said the marketing department; but they really didn’t know what was going on.

“Are you ready to set these accounts to live,” said the gurus, “so we can start building your personal brand and speaking with customers?”

“Let’s do it,” said the marketer. “Aren’t these social media accounts so authentic?”

The department, who felt compelled to participate, had a dozen pre-drafted, legal-approved messages to post online in the different forums. The bloggers who received campaign-related swag from the company wrote flattering posts about the brand and its forward thinking nature. Nobody wished to post a negative comment, for then they might lose subscribers and followers. Never was a campaign more admired.

“But what’s the ROI?” wondered an intern aloud. The question, unpopular at first, soon became widely asked. The gurus attempted to dismiss this by claiming that anyone asking the question didn’t get it. “But what’s the ROI?” repeated the senior management team, in unison.

That made a deep impression upon the marketer, for it seemed that he should know the answer, but he thought to himself, “I just need to ride this out so I can jump to my next gig.” And the department participated even more fervently as they kept launching what they believed to be a consistently clear signal into the noise of multiple social media channels.

[end]

Adapted from The Emperor’s New Clothes