Likes my As*! It’s Still About Sales and Profits!

I’ve been on this earth way longer than digital and social media has been around, way longer! And, while it has some undisputable benefits, some of the metrics leave something to be desired.

Remember when it was all about views? Achieving 4% was a blessing.

Then it became all about click thru rates. Achieving 1% was a miracle!

Then it became all about likes, shares and tweets. And we moved into the hundreds of thousands, millions and tens of millions!

Then came the age of Influencers, where racking up followers was the only true measure of success, until you truly needed to peddle a product and then you find out smaller influencers have a much more loyal following and can be more beneficial!

And God forbid if you didn’t have a personal profile, professional profile and a company profile! If you don’t have all of them, plus an Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Tik Tok and You Tube pages, you just don’t exist!

Forget the cost of all these things and the labor it takes to manage them. Agency after agency and company after company will quietly not tell you that the expense is insignificant!

All of which unfortunately happens to be true and necessary but here is where many make the biggest mistake of all. They stop measuring sales and profits and judge campaign success by likes, tweets, shares, retweets and hashtags!

Environmental causes are beautiful, we need to be kinder to Mother Earth! And charitable causes are admirable but true charity doesn’t look to pat itself on the back. So, every day we see countless companies telling you how wonderful they are, while shamelessly hoping that their good deeds lead to a financial windfall.

As the digital and social world evolved when sales weren’t commensurate with the efforts exhausted in these areas, they began counting “the success of things” to digital metrics and not monetary ones.

Our younger colleagues have been taught that success is measured by these social metrics rather than the most important factor…While it’s true posturing you and your company in the best light is recommended and favorable, the truth still lies in the bottom line of life, and in business that bottom line is money and profits!

Now as we head into a new cookieless world, have nearly more data suppliers than data users and still most of our industry professionals are both unable to decipher relevant data or uncertain what they should be looking for inside the data, we are being bombarded by companies who now claim to have the “Holy Grail” to our future.

Maybe they do, but as we move forward, we must remember one thing. No one ever does a quarterly shareholder meeting and talks more about their increase in tweets or likes more than they talk about profits, expenses and the foreseeable financial landscape!

Our industry is changing faster than nearly every other industry, but in the end it’s still an agency’s job (both creative and media) to remember the real success of a campaign is brand growth and profits!

No matter what may be taught to our younger professionals, they must also learn that if all these extra efforts don’t create an increase in business, they are all for naught! And when they are finally dismissed, it will be really hard to buy their groceries and gas with hashtags, tweets and retweets!

So, implement all these social tactics but keep your eye on the prize. It’s spelled M-O-N-E-Y! Now let me get back to writing my blog articles! LOL.