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Now that our kids are of an age - finally! - to be left at home alone in the care of the eldest, my wife and I take every opportunity to grab a chance for a walk. At week-ends, this can often lead to a hour or two spent drinking cider by the fire in a country pub. Yesterday, however, the sky was blue and the ground dry early on and we grabbed the chance for a walk in the fresh morning air. After a couple of days of intermittent but heavy rain and a cold cold breeze, it felt almost like late summer again. No pubs were open at that time, of course - and it was Sunday - so we made do with a long walk and a full breakfast on our return home.

So there you have a picture of marital and bucolic bliss. (Not that we live in the countryside but it’s only a short walk away.) And, of course, that is not the point of this post.

Getting to the point
On the walk back home my wife asked me about one of the bpodr proposals we sent out last week. My wife runs a successful company. bpodr recently helped the company revamp its web site. In addition, we’ve devised a strategy for increasing site traffic, helping the company expand into other markets, and set up a personal blog (and blogging strategy) for my wife. She’s well aware, then, of the benefits of the internet tools available to businesses of all sizes.

And yet, if I mention the term ’social media’ she guffaws. She snorts. She jeers and mocks. In short, she laughs. To her ears, ’social media’ is an ‘airy-fairy’ term. ‘It sounds as if it was made up to sound important,’ she says. ‘It’s an empty phrase. What does it mean?’

What’s in a name?
What indeed? This raises a couple of questions. Firstly, what is to be gained by collecting a number of internet tools and giving them a label of any sort, never mind one that has intelligent business people sniggering behind their hands? Secondly, how do people expert in these tools and passionate about the benefits they bring convey the impact they can have on a business without resorting to the ‘airy-fairy’?

(A quick aside: if you haven’t read this Dennis Howlett guest post on Chris Brogan’s blog and the huge number of responses it generated, please give it a visit. Although much of the discussion was about the take-up of the technology, there were a significant number of comments on the terminology itself. I think it will prove to be one of those posts which will be seem to mark the start of a sea-change in ’social media’ thinking. And by ‘post’ here, I include the comments - a good post is really only as good as the conversation it inspires.)

In most cases, there is a technological divide between companies of a certain size and the enterprise. The latter usually has the budget and staff - although perhaps in shrinking numbers at the moment - to allow a bit of boundary pushing, testing, and breaking when it comes to the sharp edge of internet innovation. Smaller businesses, however, are by nature and necessity slow to the curve. They need proof that any expenditure will satisfy at least a minimum ROI before they write cheques.

What are we measuring?
Terminology doesn’t often win over business owners. It’s usually about the bottom line and for companies trying to deliver services to these business owners, being unable to offer hard evidence for success and hiding behind what can, at times, appear to be condescending jargon, is not a recipe for a successful sale.

Griping about the difficulty of measuring ROI or complaining that revenue growth is hard to equate directly with increased web site traffic or asserting that the value of reputation cannot be counted in pound coins does little to instil confidence in the tools we propose to use. Surely it is up to us who hope to use the tools to be able to define exactly how the customer will benefit.

If it’s hard to measure something, it comes down to one of two reasons. Either we’re measuring the wrong thing or we’re using the wrong tool to measure it.

This goes for our set of tools, too. Hide behind a vacuous term and you don’t deserve a client’s business. Tell the client you can work wonders for the business but it will be hard to put that in hard numbers and watch while security arrives at the door.

Tags: ROI, social media, walking