The below preview was originally posted at SocialTrenz.com by Sergio Balegno, senior analyst with the MarketingSherpa Research Group, and lead author of the 2009 study, “Social Media Marketing and PR: Benchmarks and best practices for harnessing the power of the social marketplace”.  Visit http://www.socialtrenz.com for the original posts or click here to buy the book.

The chart in Preview 3 showed that the “Inability to measure ROI” was the second most significant barrier to social media adoption. But as this chart shows, the ability to accurately measure ROI has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the tactic. In fact, “Advertising on blogs or social networks”, which was the tactic rated as the most accurately measured (32%), was also rated least effective (16%).

Social media measurement is one of those topics about which everyone has an opinion, but nobody agrees. Like any tactic that is more aligned with PR than direct marketing, results are difficult to measure quantitatively. What marketers can do is measure the value of the resulting conversations and relationships qualitatively, and not focus on moment-in-time transactions like traffic, conversions, etc. Marketers obsessed with only tracking social media results quantitatively are missing the point and may find themselves employing much less effective social media tactics for the sake of measurability.