Weekends tend to be when I clean up my office, usually to get ready for the week ahead. Occasionally I dig into a pile of magazines that would make Homer and Langley proud and skim them before relegating them to the recycling bin.

This morning, I ran across this letter from the editor from the November 2010 issue of Fast Company. It’s a case study that’s must reading for anyone involved in any form of social media. Here’s a particularly salient excerpt:

Yes, we received half-a-billion impressions on Twitter. But did that meaningfully change our business footprint and prospects? … The value of this brand exposure won’t be apparent for some time, and even then it will be near impossible to distinguish from our other work.

Half-a-billion here, half-a-billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real social media impact … or not.

Takeaway for marketers: There’s a mix of qualitative and quantitative in pretty much everything we do all day long. When it comes to social media, quantitative looks nice on a spreadsheet, but it’s the qualitative that carry the most impact.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 16th, 2011 at 11:23 am and is filed under Internet Stuff, Marketing Stuff, Marketing Takeaways, Social Media.