Chapter 7
Tracking the Elusive ROI in Social Media
In This Chapter
- Setting spending budgets for social media
- Weighing tangible costs against intangible returns
- Measuring outcomes within the customer life cycle
- Recognizing returns
If you flipped straight to this chapter in hopes of finding the magic solution for calculating the return on investment (ROI) in social media, let me put a pin in that thought balloon straight away. There is no quick fix here and there certainly isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to quantifying the returns of your social media programs. Although many marketers are getting close to assembling the pieces necessary to honestly evaluate returns on their investments, the nuances and shades of gray clouding this valuation are numerous. However, it is possible to break through the clouds to find your way toward quantifiable returns.
Don’t buy the social media ROI snake oil. You can calculate ROI, but not with an elixir, a calculator, or a magic pill.
Organizations that are most successful in summing up the value of their social media efforts establish baselines for determining where they are today and where they end up as a result of social initiatives. Although this harkens back to aligning your measures of success with corporate goals, as explained in Chapter 5, it also requires thinking about your social media activities in non-traditional ways. This chapter explores spending trends in social media; explains how to think differently about the value of ...
