Like everyone else, I was stuck on thinking I had to prove ROI in social media, but then it finally occurred to me that the metrics designed to measure the efficacy of PR have always been murky at best! Ad equivalency? Pish posh.

Thanks for this — I’m off to write a post of my own!

Great post with comprehensive commentary.

I would only add that the challenge of quantifying the ROI of any social media outreach or marketing efforts, especially if companies wish to move beyond core social media metrics such as sentiment and activity trending, rely very much on synthesizing data from disparate sources such as web conversions or unattributed sales. For years, the shangri-la for marketers in mass media has been a media or marketing mix model that statistically estimates the value of each media based on mass advertising inputs. Seems to me the nascent social media channel, and information associated with it, could become another input into this type of model. Of course, the capability of companies to synthesize and execute on this remains a challenge while marketers simply focus on getting through their days!

Guess I could have said this more concisely - ROI seems difficult but not impossible to back into, especially if marketers are willing to accept an estimate instead of pretending that it’s a rock-hard number that C-level execs hang their hats on.

Dean
CI

Yes, but you can measure things about people, too.. specifically I’m thinking about usability metrics like the SUMI. It may be difficult to pin a dollar value on a pair of eyeballs or a blog post, but that’s not to say that anything that is human-centered can’t be measured.
I’ve worked in the User Experience field for several years, and there was the same sort of question being bantered about: how can we justify the costs, what is the ROI. If we shy away from offering up those numbers, it’s because we’re afraid to get them wrong, not because they’re not measurable. There has to be some value to everything we do. I am extremely passionate about accessibility, but it’s a hard sell for some. Even if it is about “doing the right thing and providing the user with the best experience”, someone has to pony up and define what that best experience is, and how you can tell if you’ve succeeded..

Ok, the fallacy, and you point this out, of Social Media Measurement, and I just posted about Edelman’s paper on webmetricsguru.com, is we’re trying to measure offline activities with online proxies. Social media is really, for me, a way to continure relationships with people I’ve met, or, people I will meet.

My “influence” is not my pagerank, backlinks, subscibers, Techorati Rank, Facebook Friends, Seesmic followers, Youtube video views, blog posts, Twitter followers, widgets deployed, or any of the countless things , or even a coefficent of those thing, like a rasnking is some else’s meaningless formulas (adage 150, for example).

For me, influence is simply, who I know and how much I can ask of them.

That’s an offline thing….so all the stuff people are coming up with, and god bless Steve Rubel and the rest, unless your also willing to give greater weight to the conferences I’ve attended, the people I have personally spoken with and who know me, the books and articles I have written……then, all the rest is just groping, and not coming up with much, I might add.

By the way, the paper the RoundTabe in Toronto produces will be available in a few months, so I have been told.

Marshall

K.D. - Always honored when you stop by. I agree these things can be measured and you know I’m wholly into the practice and need for measurement. But from a philosophical standpoint and to prove a point about the approach to social media, having the mindset that it’s about what you do, not what you did, makes all the difference in the world in a company’s success.