Is Social Media Working for You?

No less authoritative a business publication than the Wall Street Journal carried an article today on the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of social media efforts by small businesses last year. Having just attended the Legal Marketing Association annual conference in Denver where there were many people discussing the ratio of effort to effect, I know that this is a metric that many seek.

In our own firm, we are just beginning to see anecdotal evidence that activity in social media draws the attention of clients and people who may want to be clients. That arc of engagement for legal issues typically is lengthy and so we are still awaiting some evidence that there is actual income attached to participating in online social media. These will be dependent on some form of critical mass, which to me is related to percentage of firm participation, frequency of participation and breadth of online attention (share of eyeballs).

One thing is clear: there is some shakeout already beginning in the social media world. I wrote about that last fall in this post on Heather Milligan‘s Legal Water Cooler blog and there is a report in Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim this week about the vulnerability of bebo, the service that AOL paid about $850 milion for last year. In addition, the Google misstep in bringing Buzz to market identifies critical issues of privacy and control as significant to users in the online social media world.

That attention is focused on online social media strategy and measuring its effectiveness at the level of the Wall Street Journal is a confirmation of the current importance of these channels in business operations. We who use them, and evangelize on their benefits, owe it to our firms and friends to mark their success or lack of it. What are you doing to define and calculate the benefits of your own participation?