>Costing of a Social Media Campaign

>Hello,

This is one more of my ‘letter posts’ where I am communicating directly to you the reader rather then just writing down my thoughts from an abstract sort of perspective. Don’t have a job now, but am quite caught up with my startup company DigiWhirl. Yea, its a digi media company. I almost avoid telling people that cause there are just too many of these companies cropping up. 🙂

Well ours is a little different cause its a virtual company i.e. my partner is in Hyderabad. We plan to keep it virtual as in hire freelancers who can work from their homes etc.. I am a little apprehensive whether we can make a virtual company work in India. Probably US it might be easier.
Nonetheless this is what the attempt is.

Till now we were still more busy making our company model and researching a lot of aspects about doing social media professionally. Like the costing which is a big question cause there are many traps there.

The Number Game: For many companies and even some Social media people it is about how many fans we are getting, how much traffic we are generating. This Q is being raised by many actually.
I think that while the numbers are important cause of course a company wants thousands of fans, I also do 😛 but its important to see how those fans are being gathered. That for me decides how meaty the campaign is.
So simply quoting some deliverable numbers for which they pay us is not what I want to do, but of course I will have to see what companies are demanding.

Costing for the Time: This is what we are doing currently, costing for the time that we spend. The crucial factor in this is to clearly foresee what it will take from us. Chart a detailed activity sheet only then can we figure the exact time that we will spend. Then cost that time according to some industry agreeable amount (which we are experimenting with).

Budget Percentage: Another way that I have read some US companies are doing is to cost the campaign at some percentage of their overall marketing budget. Typically something like 15% of their entire marketing budget, but then here of course there are a few big hurdles like how do we know their marketing budget? also it all becomes a matter of convincing the company guy…

So this is where the company is. I am not able to blog much and I miss this thinking out of stuff.