Bear with me this week as I do some thinking out loud in preparation of two days of meetings later this week in San Antonio to talk about public relations and social media strategy.
photo credit: Surat Lozowick
I'm exploring the idea that social media and influence or reputation enhancement efforts can be measured as a component of Return on Investment (ROI). I happen to believe that you can't make the leap from measuring metrics to measuring ROI; they can complement each other and social media can bolster ROI, but I don't believe you can actually count social media tactics as a measurable variable in calculating Return on Investment.
First of all, social media usually requires trading dollars for time. The amount of time you spend on social media doesn't translate well into dollars, unless you can show the time spent is a direct expense of the marketing or public relations team. In this sense, time is not measurable because it doesn't generate actually results.
You can count the results and fold them into your marketing or public relations expenses, but at that point you are actually county metrics, i.e., how many people responded to an outreach campaign by filling out a form, or brought in a coupon, or responded to your blog post.
The outcomes of these efforts can generate a return on investment, but you can't leap right to the familiar equation. There's a few steps you must take in between and measuring the metrics is a good place to start.
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At this time, I agree with you. While I've seen many people turn quite a bit out of social media, they haven't gotten it down to a science where they can get the same results over and over again. There are a lot of factors that are out of the marketers hands. While I've had a bunch of experience measuring ROI from traditional strategies, I haven't found anything SM ROI proof in my testing.