frankly speaking

This is a good deck on assessing the ROI of social media. The thing that I think is missing is on slide 26 as it implies that in order for one to get a full understanding of ROI on a company’s social media activities, you need to take into account interaction and influence. I couldn’t disagree more.

While interaction and influence are important at the end of the day, they probably did not close the sale (though, you can rightfully argue that they helped lead to the sale, which leads to the age old problem of value attribution in the digital space).

Return on Investment for any channel in the digital space is easily measured by knowing the dollar value of sales generated for every dollar invested in advertising. It’s that simple.  While I think social media is valuable and at some point in the future may be even more valuable than search (in terms of ROI/ROAS), right now it’s still under-performing for a lot for a lot of companies  in terms of driving actual sales.