Much of my time is spent working through social media strategies and channels. Inevitably, the conversation turns to ROI, as though there is a magic number no one has claimed, but everyone wants to know. These three letters have stood for everything from “Help me make a quantifiable case,” to “I’ll believe social media is effective when you can show exactly how the money comes back.”

And then, as I was writing one such ROI case I looked at the phone on my desk, wondering what the ROI of our phone system was. Our phones are built specifically for conversation. They convey the subtle shades of emotional context that make communications effective. Phones connect the enterprise and help our relationships with customers.

But I rarely use the phone on my desk at all. Maybe a small handful of times each week, there is some cause to engage this 34-key device. But does it justify the expense? Is it even reasonable to ask that?

Should Social Media fall under operations?

So it’s easy to come to consensus that the Phone is a necessary communications channel. Why isn’t the phone system a part of the marketing or user experience group? If operations is responsible for the phone system, why aren’t they also responsible for the social media channels?

To me, Marketing and Brand have become communications R&D, which should allow budget for these new channels of communications to be fully explored, and then passed to operations for company-wide integration on the channel level.

After all, as I type this post and communicate with hundreds of people, my phone, with its tremendous infrastructure of nationwide wiring decades old, has sat silently all morning.

What do you think? Continue the conversation in the comments below, by clicking the “contact” link above, or @mleis.

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