Looking for a little more spark in your social strategy?

Let’s be real – social hasn’t been easy. After a fairly weak Black Friday/Cyber Monday for social commerce (but strong for social traffic), retailers are looking at ways to really make something of this channel. The one thing we do know is that customers are on social media – they’re surfing the channel and engaging with social media brand pages. But we still need to find a way to turn all that juicy traffic into more sales, better engagement, stronger loyalty.

At the upcoming conference, Social Commerce Strategies, many speakers from companies like DSW, Benefit Cosmetics and Patagonia, will discuss this very challenge. In the below presentation, former Walgreens Head of Social Media, Adam Kmiec, presents a case for the ‘Return on Amazing’ for social marketing campaigns. Kmiec looks at wins Coca-Cola and his time at Walgreens, among other campaigns.

Check out the video below, or if you’d rather read the transcript, you can download that here.

Transcript excerpt:

…And how many of you have been asked the question of, “What is this thing doing with my business,” right? You are the life of the business, right? And it looks like this. It says, okay, we’ve got these 2 million fans on Facebook and about 16%, 15% of them actually saw my post, right? And about another 10% have actually clicked on it and another 10% actually ended up converting at some dollar amount, let’s call it 10 bucks of transaction which leads to $30,000. You have literally just reduced yourself to direct mail. You’ve reduced yourself to e-mail. You’ve reduced yourself to paid search. You’ve reduced yourself to banner advertising. That completely misses the point of social marketing at scale.
But this is really easy to demonstrate. You can say, “Look, this campaign worked. The campaign worked. The campaign had the ROI. Social didn’t have the ROI.” And to Comono fundings we used to kind of debate at Walgreens was the attribution modeling. So, if someone comes to the Facebook page, then searches for something on Google, do I get credit for the sale? Well, no, because if you’re using last click, then, of course, the page source got it. So, how do you really want to kind of start to measure this? You can sort of see why it becomes a very jumbled complicated mess.

And in that goal of trying to get to the ROI, it’s almost like we’re so far up against this tree, you don’t even see the forest of the opportunity. You just do not see it fundamentally, and it frankly then starts to lead to a shortage of what I call Amazing Ideas. And that’s actually where Return on Amazing as a concept started about two and a half years ago.

I believe people have always been very social, like extremely social. You hear something that’s amazing, you tell someone about it. You have something that’s a very negative experience, you tell someone about it. The concept of being social as a human being is innate. It’s there. It’s been there.

I think people want to be amazed. I think you want to walk into a hotel and find out, “You know what, we’re going to upgrade you to penthouse suite just because it’s available.” That’s amazing. You want to be the person who, when you check in and you request getting the upgrade on the flight, you actually get it. Now, it’s a small victory, it is. But that’s actually sometimes, at the end of the day of a really long day, a really amazing experience.

The problem is when you think about the ad agency model and you think about the marketing model, we only try to do this once a year. We do it for the Super Bowl. We put all of our eggs into one giant basket and we say on the world’s largest stage, not including the Olympics, when the Olympics isn’t running, we’re going to do the most amazing experience that we ever can think of. I got a tough time with that because you’re taking one gigantic gamble. Unless what you do what Google did when they did Parisian Love, which is they ran a bunch of ads online. They looked at which ones actually resonated the most and then they pick that ad to run during the Super Bowl. See, that’s smart marketing. That’s taking insights over opinions. That’s taking ideas and making them flourish.

And thus our problem begins…