MIS Assignment #5 - The Business of Social Media and Making the ROI Case

Questions 1

Let’s suppose your current annual sales are $1 million. You implement a social media strategy and begin generating $200,000 in revenue through your Facebook page. At the end of the year, your sales are still $1 million. Was your social media strategy successful? Why or why not?

With the assumption of the ultimate goal of implementing a social media strategy is to increase sales and not of gaining more or better relationships or brand awareness, here we can conclude that the implementation of social media strategy was not successful.

This is because it does not able to increase the bottom line revenues at the end of the year.

Although it has generated $200,000 in revenue through Facebook page, however we assumed it somehow has affected the revenues from other sales points such as e-commerce web portal and physical store. 

Questions 2

Every social media strategy costs money to implement and we listed a few those costs in this case study. Create a more comprehensive list of social media strategy costs. Briefly describe each cost and identify it as either a fixed cost or a variable cost.

Besides the costs of hiring people, here are other costs associated to  implementing social media strategy: 

Fixed Cost	Variable Cost
Tools/SaaS – Used to manage all social media activities such as management of contents, images, videos, marketing campaigns, data analysis, market research, etc. Customer Service – Used to create new relationship and retain existing customers, suppliers and partners. Outsource – Outsourcing of social media work to 3rd party such as designing, consulting, auditing, maintenance and support etc.	Content – Articles, posts, webinars, videos, images, etc Advertisement and Promotions – Number of social media sites participate on such as on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter etc.

Questions 3

Suppose you have a successful business with a well-liked product. One day something goes wrong and you ship 100,000 defective products. Almost the entirety of your customer base is disgruntled. What social media strategy would you employ to help? Why? Would you be better off just “waiting for it to blow over“ or “sticking your head  in the sand”?

From our opinion, since social media has the speed to disseminate shared information therefore it would be the right strategy for public relation management to use social media platforms to outreach the public and overcome negative impact. 

Questions 4

In the case study, we listed five steps to success.

•       Clearly Identify Goals and Objectives

•       Think Quality, Not Quantity

•       Build Compelling Social Media

•       User Social Media as a Market Research Tool

•       Take Advantage of Analytic

Identify two others and briefly describe them.

•       Build Relationship – Response to customers, suppliers and business partners in a timely manner. Give free advice and tips and get known as a subject expert.

•       Learn to use the tools properly - You have the plan and strategy, therefore master the tools to smoothen the implementation and operation so that can be more productive, effective and efficient.