The ROI From Twitter: "Don't bother" telling your CFO, O'Reilly says

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May 21st, 2009

The ROI From Twitter: "Don't bother" telling your CFO, O'Reilly says

O’Reilly Media held a Webinar this afternoon that was promoted as delivering “power tips” on how to use Twitter.

In the question and answer period, after Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein delivered their tips, one of the questions was: “How do you quantify the benefit of Twitter to a CFO?”

O’Reilly’s response:

“I wouldn’t bother.”

It’s very difficult to quantify the return on investment of Twitter, to an organization, he said. Instead, he takes a Nike stance on it: “Just use it.”

Just use it and the value will become apparent, he contends.

Sure, he acknowledges that the around-the-clock pressure to issue insightful tweets of your own and at same time constantly watch the tweet streams of folks you follow can be a time sink. “It can be very addictive,’’ the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media told the 1,055 participants in the online presentation.

So I thought I’d use one of the “power tips” and see if there was an answer. The tip: If you want to see what’s been said on a subject, just search on the term in Twitter. You’ll find that discussion of the subject will lead you to useful links and insight on the subject.

Maybe I’m not willing to click far enough down on the stream, but searching on “ROI from Twitter” doesn’t produce much. Indeed, the primary support for the concept might appear at first blush to be a single article in Advertising Age that declared that a New Orleans pizza joint (backed by the ubiquitous Mark Cuban) had generated 15% of a day’s sales from a Twitter promotion.

Didn’t say how the promotion worked, but basically you get the idea that commercial establishments will set up Twitter ...

Original URL

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=18548

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=18548