Blog: Hey! It worked

By Stephen Lee: 

  It has been a year of growth in the world of digital corporate conversations. In 2011, many of the companies took their first steps into Social Media launching simple test campaigns.  Well established companies found themselves in the strange position of taking the baby steps required to use these rapidly developing channels and creating their first strategies, targets and tactics. Earned media was taken to a whole new level.

2012 will prove to be a year where I think everyone will need to get in the game or be left behind with lots of ground to catch up.  As we participated with many different kinds of brands and businesses, it really showed that 2011 was a great year for “getting wet” in social media.  I was happy to see that the metrics on each project showed that social channels in combination with traditional channels had the potential to bring real value. Finnair and Finavia’s Quality Hunters program reached more than 8 million people in its first 6 weeks via Twitter and continues to grow today.

I am looking for 3 things to stand out in 2012:

1. More C level executives are going to begin to demand real ROI from social efforts even more than 2011
2. Companies that do best in social media will start a wider social movement and become the leaders of these movements
3. More companies will be listening to online conversations and engaging in dialog rather than just pushing messages through social channels. 

So, welcome to 2012! Now that more and more companies are seeing that social media has a real business impact I believe it will show that we have gone past the idea of social conversations being simply a short-term campaigns. Social media creates relationships and communities. We are establishing communities that should not be abandoned once successfully started. This is drastically different from the paid media methods companies have used for so long.  It seems that in case after case, companies that use digital social tools best are creating and measuring the development of long term and organic movements that drive real business objectives for the company.