Tripp Fenderson

Mike over at MEDIA GUERRILLA shares some insight this morning about the high costs of doing business in places like Facebook and other social media outlets.

What caught my attention was this line:

And by “soft costs” what I’m really getting at are the *absurdly high* time and attention investments that typically come with these projects and what are the unique shared scars among many a social media practitioner. If you’ve ever administered a blog or a community of sorts, you’ll know what I mean, nuff said.

I had good success advertising with the Facebook Flyers program, despite most reports saying the conversion rates are pathetically low. My message and geographic group was extremely targeted though, which likely led to higher rates than a general ad campaign.

While I was able to generate some traffic on the cheap, what I hadn’t planned for was the impact the growth would have on my “behind the curtains” time. At the time, we were a 2-man shop and the impact was huge.

Lesson learned?

Managing a community site requires a lot of time on tasks that the community never sees. Tasks like:

Dealing with trolls
Fighting off spammers in the guise of new members
Making sure the CMS is configured to meet new demands
Troubleshooting login issues for customers using a crappy ISP (I’m talking to you, AOL)
Dealing with broken links.
Staying on top of the chatter for terms of service violations
Staying on top of the chatter for for new ideas.

...and the list goes on and on and on.

And that list doesn’t include the daily community massages required to keep things running smoothly (stimulating conversations, pointing people to resources, etc)

The amount of time allocated for good community management should never be underestimated—the set it and forget it mentality doesn’t apply. And because time and attention aren’t cheap, when you’re putting together your ROI for a project, you need to include the costs associated with hiring an experienced community manager.

You can read Mike’s full post here: Social Media Marketing Ain’t Always “Cheap”