Attended Business Development Institute’s Social Integration event today at CUNY  NY Graduate Center; listening to the last case study from Richard Pesce of Sprint Nextel and attending two RoundTables.

Overall, my impression – corporations are now trying to figure out where to fit social media spend, what department(s) it belongs in, and how much to spend (with over 49% from a recent case study that are allocating 0$ to Social Media, but still want to employ social media).    In Sprint’s case, using Twitter was easier (and  things that are easy are more likely to happen than doing difficult things) – and they ended up taking existing customer service people and adding listing to conversations on Twitter, than getting other groups to do it.

But I didn’t hear anyone crack Social Media ROI today – and in both RoundTables I attended,  seemed to have more ideas about how to do that than anyone else I listed to  (with the moderators looking for input and feedback from the RoundTable attendees).

One of the RoundTable’s I attended was on Scaling Social Across the Enterprise, moderated by Michael Hubble from Corporate Executive Board – a group that does research for several of the top CMO’s in Corporate America.    Michael Hubble mentioned they advise CMO’s on the 70/20/10 rule of marketing  budget allocation:

1. Spend 70% of your marketing budget on programs that are proven to  highly profitable
2. Spend 20% of your marketing budget on programs that are somewhat profitable
3. Spend the remaining 10% of your marketing budget on experimental projects that are not currently known to be profitable (such as Social Media).

That’s interesting to me, implying that Social Media can, and should, for the time being, receive up to 10% of the marketing spend (though it receives no where near that in most cases, for many reasons including scalability).

Also, a Social Media Opportunity Diagnostic was presented in this RoundTable that is often presented to client CMO’s to show them what parts of their organization are utilizing Social Media (similar to an audit) – the chart below as the summary of the ~500 CMO’s who participated in this survey:

Interestingly, R&D/New Product Development was at 70% not participating while Customer Service had 65% of the CMO’s saying those parts of their companies did not participate in Social Media.

With Process Work, again, New Product Development (where you’d think Social Media would help – as in the case of Kodak, that asks customers what features they want in the next cameras) would be called for – but many of the organizations surveyed are risk aversive – and social media is seen, in many cases, as a risk.

Even more telling is looking at the polices related to Social Media  many companies have implemented, or haven’t yet implement.

I don’t think I need to comment on the chart above – it speaks for itself – I think this chart will change a lot in the next 18 months – my prediction (improve) as Social Media ROI is cracked, bit by bit.

The other RoundTable I attended was on Commercializing Your Social Relationships, moderated by Michael DiLorenzo, who runs Social Media Marketing and strategy for the National Hockey League.   What I heard worked the best was:

1. Using Tweetups to promote special offers to NHL fans – coupon codes that could only be obtained via the Tweetup were then spread online to friends and spread like wildfire.
2. Working with Local Hockey Teams to sell unused inventory of tickets (and get fans to games where they might spend money at the game) using house databases AND Twitter (when they knew a fan was in the area where a game was playing).   Also, when a fan of team lived anywhere near where the team was playing – they reached out to them, as well, in the same ways.

What was problematic was how often to contact fans and the best ways to do it. While a Tweet might often be missed, a DM would not be, but if used DM’s every day, many fans would get annoyed and drop out.

Overall, I was glad I went to BDI’s Social Integration event today – and what I got was that this year the landscape for Social will change considerably – more so than in the last few years. Also, as business becomes more “Social” – will it change?

And that got me thinking about Reputation Management again – but that’s the subject of yet another post.