I have had the chance to engage in delivering a couple of training courses and digital marketing workshops here in Saudi Arabia. I have delivered those for students and professionals from different industries. The most common questions I receive during which, are around the following topics:

1- What’s hot?
2- How can I keep up with the crazy changing digital landscape?
3- What is the best network for my business/industry?
4- Change, how can I convince my management about the need for us as an organization to utilize digital channels and engage with consumers?
5- How can I justify /measure my return on investment in social media?

Sure, these questions are valid and more will continue to come from strategic and tactical perspectives. Is this weird, it is like I have a job what should I do to function! It is not weird, but really fine.
The most interesting job in the whole world is to interact with people on a daily basis and spend working hours and sometimes off work hours thinking how to improve it… It is only true when a social media community specialist full day job is to craft, reply, analyze and optimize all sorts of content and interaction she or he deals with in whichever network.  While it is important to keep up with the digital madness, it is also important to look up the opportunity that falls in the target audience’s interest and try to utilize it. What I mean by that is not all new networks are useful for any business, and there are case studies and research resources that give insights and hints for what works best for which type of business.

Many resources online today provide news and updates on the latest dynamics of digital and social business, to name few as examples, Mashable.com, allthingsD.com, clickz.com, and for insights there are more like Econsultancy, Forrester research, Adobe, Global web index, TNS, Nielsen, and many more… The search for digital marketing on any search engine will reveal many good results.

Numbers are always trusted as a proof for any activity in business, conversions, costs, ease of use and implementation, speed, measure-ability, transparency, GTS (guarantee to see) vs. OTS (opportunity to see) and other indicators can help anyone to secure budgets for digital channels and implementations from management and business owners in the case of traditional family businesses as well. It is always a plus to test with a small amount of budget to do a proof of concept, as they always say, nail it then scale it…

It is measurable indeed, though sometimes it is not always direct like vouchers, coupons and online commerce, but social media activities are measurable by utilizing different tools and techniques like Facebook commerce and ads tools to track offers, event registrations, downloads, etc,, so by this it is more viable to have a clear ROI for social media investments on agencies, head counts, assets and other things used. It might vary based on what objective to achieve, but the concept is one, either by direct business impact like sales figures and traffic, or indirect measurement through surveys and other methods to see the value of WOM (word of mouth).

It is an endless process of adding more to someone’s tasks day by day as digital platforms evolve. The most crucial point to notice here is to quickly unlearn, learn adapt and optimize…

Do you think there are other important questions too?