From Geoffrey Sheldon, VP, Brand Planning Director, Palio

Whenever I hear discussions about one of the biggest urban myths associated with social media – that it’s “free” – I automatically think of Lewis Strauss’ infamous “too cheap to meter” quote about nuclear energy.

In fact, believe it or not, you can actually draw many parallels between these two misnomers.

The Nuclear Chain

The act of producing nuclear energy sounds fairly simple: use the heat produced from a nuclear reaction to convert water to steam that drives a turbine, and Bob’s your uncle – energy that’s too cheap to meter.

In reality however, the process is a little more complex, and getting to that energy production requires an intensive process involving exploration, mining, and enrichment before uranium ore is ready to be placed into a reactor. And it doesn’t stop there; once the fuel is spent, it’s either recycled (reprocessed) or converted into material for nuclear weapons (both extremely complex processes).

In addition, at each stage along this nuclear chain, the radioactive waste that is produced must be carefully handled and stored, and if there is an accident (a Chernobyl style meltdown, for example) or if the radioactive material falls into the wrong hands, the results can be catastrophic. Therefore the whole process requires careful handling and intense security, and suddenly that cheap energy is not looking so rosy, or cheap.

The Social Media Chain

Similarly, the use of social media to promote your brand also sounds fairly simple: Utilize the free channels to set up a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a YouTube account, develop a blog, and you’re on your way.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple; in fact it’s a whole lot more complex and requires careful planning and oversight. Analogous to producing nuclear energy, the process for developing, executing, and maintaining a successful social media presence is very intensive and requires the similar steps of exploration, mining, enrichment, and production

• By exploration, I mean strategic planning – Developing clear marketing and communication objectives for your social media efforts
• By mining, I mean insight mining – Gaining a deep understanding of how your target audience uses these channels, and uncovering the unique opportunities on how you can connect with them there
• By enrichment, I mean content – Clearly defining what type of content will be developed and distributed
• And by production, I mean propagation – Defining who, and on what time frame, is responsible for generating, and maintaining content

Then there is the monitoring component of social media. In this space, things can easily go wrong and you can quickly lose control of your brand and messaging (akin to a reactor meltdown or having radioactive material fall into the wrong hands) so it’s essential that you are constantly monitoring the space to make sure that you are able to react to anything negative. Pre-planning for these types of worst-case scenarios can help you respond quickly and redirect ill-will to avert disaster (reprocessing, to draw another nuclear analogy).

At what price free?

All of this, of course, takes significant amounts of time and energy, and this is where the waste component of the nuclear chain comes into play. While the hours you invest in your social media efforts are not waste per se, the process of developing, executing, monitoring and maintaining them is extremely labor intensive, and those hours have to come from somewhere or someone (i.e. they are an unexpected drain on your resources). And when you start adding up those hours, assigning dollar signs to them, and including them in your ROI analyses, suddenly your “free” presence in the social space is not looking so free anymore, in fact you might find it’s not even looking too cheap to meter.