“What we have here is a failure to communicate,” says the evil prison warden Strother Martin as he sentences Paul Newman to a night in the box (a small, hot punishment cell), in the classic 1967 film Cool Hand Luke.

Fast forward to today.
Exactly the same words could be used to describe the disconnect between social media advocates and their prospective customers. Those advocates risk a night in the box – or maybe a box on the ears – when they fail to speak the language as CMOs, CFOs and CEOs. It may be one reason why so many Cs say they’re “sick of hearing about Web 2.0 and related buzzwords such as ‘blogs’ and ‘social networking’” in a survey by the Marketing Executives Networking Group.

You’d think that in the communications business, the value of clear, effective communication would be taken for granted. But you’d be wrong, because some of our contemporaries require constant reminders, as in this Small Business Trends post by Zane Safrit.  He reminds us that “The story CEOs and CFOs want to hear is the story of numbers that go up and numbers that go down.”

Speak to the Cs.
It’s an issue we touched on a few months back, when we said “Help them decide in your favor by demonstrating ROMI — Return On Marketing Investment.” Now we’re wondering if Rosetta Stone could create a special version of its language learning software to teach social media advocates how to speak the language of business. It would turn social media’s jargon into a fluent translation for real-life business:
•    From “tweets, trackbacks, links, rss feeds, feed readers, community members, blogtrolls, stalkers, spambots, and organic SEO…”
•    …to “qualified sales leads, conversion rates, sales per customer, revenues, customer churn and cost of acquisition.”

It’s late summer now — back to school season for many marketers. And time for social media advocates who want to sell to Cs to go back to school themselves, before they receive a big “F,” which stands for “Failure to communicate.”

Stop Talking Marketing…and start talking business. If you want to get CEO and CFO support for your marketing initiatives, speak C-level language. That’s the idea summarized so well in Michael Radigan’s advocacy of a better way to measure marketing.

Stop talking about response rates, click-throughs, viewership levels, readership scores, survey results and so forth. And start talking to the “C Suite” about what they understand: Money. Their rise or fall – and your budget – is determined by sales and profits, not by the marketing department’s deems metrics.

On a daily basis, The “C Suite” make investment decisions, showing how to allocate the company’s resources to maximize sales and profits. Help them decide in your favor by demonstrating ROMI – -Return On Marketing Investment. Show them how each dollar spent on past or proposed marketing programs generates more than one dollar in sales.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But how many marketers are actually doing it? And why are the rest not doing it? We’d like to hear from you, and learn how you’re using ROMI as the key metric for marketing decisions. The new breed of Super CMO’s uses ROMI as their foundation.
Do You?