The two questions I get in every conference in which I speak are:

1) How do I convince my executives to invest in social?

2) What is the ROI of social?

I have the answer.

Instead of spending the next 10 hours building a presentation and financial business case for your executives with fancy terms and diagrams as suggested by Social Media gurus and agencies (see my take on them here), spend those 10 hours talking to your customers in social right now and CREATE GREAT CUSTOMER STORIES and play them back to the executives.

I guarentee this will get them to invest.

Your customers are already in social and are ripe for the serving or you wouldn’t be trying to sell the execs in the first place. Serve them, even on a small scale, even on an individual level, make them happy, and play it back internally. That will fire everyone up more than a presentation or business case.

It has worked at Dell, arguably one of the most quantatively focused companies in history. Executives love to hear about that multi-million dollar deal that turned around because the customer engaged with Dell’s experts in communities. Or, executives love hearing about that really angry customer who Dell turned around in social and then saw the success story go viral, prompting more sales.

It’s that simple!