Social media continues to gain acceptance, but PR and marketing still grapple with ROI, measuring success and how to best sell their social media programs and budgets to clients and senior management. In our series of interviews leading up to PR+MKTG Camp Seattle, we turn to Katlen (Kat) Tillman.

Katlen is a Senior Account Supervisor, Digital Strategy and Development at Edelman Digital, a division of Edelman PR. She has helped clients such as Microsoft, Adobe, and Shell by strategizing and executing online public engagement programs that are based on research, increasing online visibility, managing reputation, engaging customers and ultimately building relationships between brands and consumers. She has also worked on the client-side on brands such as American Funds – a Capital Group Company, Classmates Online, T-Mobile, and Starbucks, and successfully helped these businesses develop their digital brand presence driven by sound Web site and digital marketing strategies.

Kat is a moderator for Session 4:

Strategy and Execution: Achieving Internal Buy in for Your Social Media Programs. In this session, we focus on defining ROI and how PR and marketing can set realistic expectations for achieving buy in from clients and management.

Katlen Tillman Interview

Question: How do you sell your social media programs?  Extensions of traditional PR and marketing programs, an entirely separate program, market test, major initiative?

Katlen Tillman: Social media programs are never sold in the exact same way. If the question “How do you sell your social media programs” were a multiple choice question:

a) Extensions of traditional PR and marketing programs

b) An entirely separate program

c) Market test

d) Major initiative

e) All of the above

The answer would be (e). The adoption of Social Media programs within our clients’ communication and marketing strategy varies across a spectrum given that the client can sit in either a PR or marketing-related function. It also will depend on the business objective, audience insight, and the brands’ comfort level with chartering “new waters.” We prefer to approach communication / marketing program planning with a research phase,  and start out as strategy and tactics agnostic as possible; this allows us to present the best programmatic strategy – which invariably includes a Social Media-related component, which is based on research insights that essentially ladders down to a solid tactical plan for execution.

Question: Is proving ROI getting in the way of building a successful social media strategy?

Katlen: As analytics and the ability to measure become more sophisticated, after all we’ve been doing this for a while now, proving ROI isn’t getting in the way of building a successful Social Media strategy. At times, expectations as to what clients think the success should be is our biggest hurdle. We work very closely with clients to set realistic expectations from an established baseline to ensure that what we’re doing is the right thing. Striving for the right ROI is part of what a successful Social Media strategy delivers against.

Question: How do you measure success and demonstrate ROI?

Katlen: We like to focus particularly in 6 areas: Attention, Engagement, Authority, Influence, Sentiment and Conversion. Here is a simplistic example, if a client comes to us with a situation that is impacting negatively on their brand and we’re able to demonstrate movement around Influence and Sentiment, we’ve demonstrated ROI for the strategy. The measurement and demonstration will depend on the objective and the desired outcome, knowing that Social Media is a big experiment. The good news is since we have been doing this for a long time, we’ve grown smart about it, which means that we can evaluate success and demonstrate ROI for our clients – and do it in specifically measurable ways.

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