Should ROI be linked to social media use, or are there larger, non-monetary measures to be considered?

This post responds to Rosenblatt, Alan. 2010. Rules of Social Media Engagement. http://www.frogloop.com/care2blog/2010/10/20/rules-of-social-media-engagement.html and

Rosenblatt, Alan. 2010. Measuring the Impact of Your Social Media Program. http://www.frogloop.com/care2blog/2010/10/19/measuring-the-impact-of-your-social-media-program.html

These articles examine ways in which organizations can measure the “influence” of their social media efforts and raise some basic questions.  Is it possible to measure “influence,” and if so, how and to what extent?  If these measurements can be accomplished, how can they be standardized for use amongst a myriad of organizations employing a diverse range of social media strategies?

Rosenblatt encourages organizations to measure the influence of the social media through three categories: Reach, Engagement, Driving web traffic home.

Rosenblatt begins his analysis by stating that “[T]he need to assess their return on investment (ROI) is critical.”  But when analysis of social media’s effectiveness and measures of its “influence” and “reach” may not be truly quantifiable, it may be a stretch to say ROI can be correlated to social media efforts.

Rosenblatt explains the fundamental problem with identifying the efficacy of reach and “potential reach,” as “causality:”  we can count TV watchers, but “we don’t know how many viewers actually saw your ad,” and we don’t know if the ad caused them to buy the product.

I wonder if including “reach” in this list of measurements is appropriate?  Perhaps a more concentrated effort or analysis of “engagement” and “driving web traffic home” would be more effective in measuring the success of social media.  In fact, for organizations looking for quantifiable ways to measure their social media efforts, I wonder if including reach as a measure of influence decreases the credibility of a given analysis?

I believe reach is a less successful (and less valuable) measure than actually focusing on analyzing your fans and followers, for example, on Twitter and the number and time spent on your site, which can truly be measured with concrete data and statistics.  As Rosenblatt says, measuring the quality of your audience allows you to “better target them for engagement.”  My preference would be less emphasis on reach and more in depth analysis of the tools and tactics organizations could use for tracking social media engagement and driving web traffic home.

An example of a more effective tool examined by Rosenblatt is:

“MyTweeple allows you to download your entire Twitter list (followers and followed) to a spreadsheet, along with all their profile information.  This allows you to sort and identify who among your list of followers are influencers and, who among them follow you back.”

Yes assessing ROI is critical, but I don’t believe that this is the only way for organizations to evaluate the “value” in social media.  I don’t believe reach and engagement can be measured in monetary terms, and I don’t think that they necessarily should be.

In the end, I believe that evaluating social media solely on a monetary basis as justification for its use may be missing larger reasons for its use, e.g. engagement and public participation.