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What’s the ROI of a person who joins a gym…and then goes to that gym once per month?

What’s the ROI of a person who starts a New Year’s resolution to lose weight…and then eats pizza and ice cream five times a week?

Are You as Tired of This Question as I Am?

What’s the ROI of a person who spends more time asking “what’s the ROI of this” as opposed to just buckling down and DOING the things most likely to create that ROI?

I, for one, am tiring of the “is there ROI in Social Media” question. If you’re reading this, I’m going to guess that you might agree with me on my perspective.

Here’s the bottom line on ROI, and it doesn’t matter if we’ve talking about gaining muscle, losing weight or making B2B or B2C connections in Social Media: the people use a little bit of commons sense and who also work the hardest *tend* to do the best.

Sorry to make this sound so simple, but I think it really IS that simple.

Simple. Common. Sense.

When I look around at the people who are CLEARLY getting a solid ROI in the real estate/Social Media space, all of them have almost all of these traits in common:

• 
  
  They work very hard (for a primer on this, read Gary Vaynerchuk’s “Crush It“)
• They share something of value on a consistent basis (the subject of Vaynerchuk’s next book, “Thank You Economy“)
• They are constantly connected
• They are constantly engaging with others
• They almost never “sell” anything
• They are positive people

In my humble opinion, there’s nothing in the list I just wrote that is “proprietary” or even remotely original.

Every one of those items is simple common sense for anyone who’s been in Social Media for more than a month.

Exhibit A

I could give you a number of examples of people I know personally who are creating meaningful ROI in Social Media using this approach, but I’ll just give you one: Chris Smith (@TechSavvyAgent) of TechSavvyAgent.com.

As you probably know, Chris just won the Inman News‘ (@InmanNews) “People’s Choice” Award, which they hand out as part of their annual “100 Most Influential” awards. That means that Chris did SOMETHING to compel people to actually take action and vote for him, and he did this to a greater degree than anyone else during 2010.

I know Chris personally, and I can tell you how I think he won this award. He did everything on my “simple common sense” list bigger and better than anyone else. Yes, I realize that there was a little more to it than that, and Chris IS a special talent, but, at the very core of the matter, this was essentially his template for success. He just #CRUSHED it on a massive scale, and he gave a LOT of people a LOT of reasons to say “thank you.” And by the way, he leveraged Social Media to do probably 90% of those things that caused all those people to say “thank you.”

Less Asking. More Doing.

In conclusion, let’s stop talking about ROI, shall we?

If you want results, go the gym, eat more salad and start doing the obvious things that create the ROI we all want to achieve from Social Media…