The Social Media ROI Cookbook

Susan Etlinger along with Jeremiah Owyang and Andrew Jones over the Altimeter Group recently released The Social Media ROI Cookbook: Six Ingredients Top Brands Use to Measure the Revenue Impact of Social Media.  There are quite a few good insights in this report (About?).  I focused on an problem we all discuss an stress about regularly, to me is the first question they pose: Which of the following have been challenges?  The number 1 answer with 56% is the "Inability to tie social media to business outcomes".(The number 1 challenge for social marketers is to directly link business value to activity on social media channels) People wonder why social media ROI is still such a hot topic - this is why.  Business invest in people, teams, projects, marketing and countless other efforts and assets to eventually create revenue.  Businesses have to show why their investments are moving them more towards their business objectives.  If the business can't see value through metrics or faith, they don't get funded.  Social Marketing is still too knew to rely on faith and reputation so we need to prove business value.  Susan lays out a great set of 6 ways of measuring impact of social media on revenue.

There are other great insights Susan shares with us in her article.  I recommend downloading and reading. further points to discuss about ROI in future posts.  I think we are still not talking about one of the core issues yet because we don't have a great answer for it yet(I feel like we (the social marketing industry) are talking this all the time.  You engage more than I do... let me know your thoguhts) Our goal is to fill this gap, soon.  For now here are my thought on the report.

You can take a look at it here and download a copy for yourself.  You can also listen to a webinar next week where Susan goes into more details about the report.