Are there tools to measure anything you want? How Twitter impacted sales, for instance? Or how many RTs leaded to sales...?

What are the most common things measured?

I should think that's an important audience, Brian, for organizations delivering messages and information.  It's probably a much less important audience for commercial enterprises; there's certainly a risk that it will get overlooked.

True, Steve.

When I met with the League of Women Voters and told them of my Twitter thoughts, their first reaction was, "What about the senior citizens who don't use computers?" 

The response to that has to be that we will reach them differently.  Eventually, the response might be that they DO have computers (at some point, Genx'ers will be seniors) but not yet.

That just plays up that social media is one avenue, not THE avenue.  Companies don't need social media strategies, they need communications strategies (with one or more approaches utilizing social media).

That's a very good question, Paul, and I admit I'm less skeptical than Scott on this issue.  As so often, what we're looking for here is not cause and effect in some pure, metaphysical sense, but rather a reliable (and replicable) correlation. 

To take one example, if brand advocacy by one or more key social media players in a specific location is repeatedly correlated with message adoption in that same location (whether measured by consumer responses, increased sales, or whatever the benchmark is); and the feedback loop (the conversation) is consistent with the brand advocacy driving the success; then we can reasonably infer a correlation here.  In other words, the social engagement is effective in achieving whatever the goal (ROI) might be.

We could multiply examples.  The examples: the challenge is to have the right tools for collecting and analyzing the data.

Mr Roques, I did talk about ROI.  This can't be overlooked, although an enterprise has to decide just what return it wants to measure: brand awareness, brand reputation, leads, sales.  It's important to define the goal of the social engagement and have the tools to evaluate success in reaching it.

Kq4m, thanks for the comment.  Although the way we measure social media results is still open to much refinement, I believe it can be done, and it's vital that it's done if - as seems likely - social is going to be the key marketing platform of the future.  I would not envisage each function within a company interpreting and evaluating the data on its own performance.

Paul - It seems that in the beginning, data could be shaped however you wanted to make your point. More and more, I think we're seeing that with the longitude comes better metrics. Maybe not exact enough but moving in a better reliable direction at least.

I don’t exactly know what promise “socialytics” hold in developing reliable metrics that can be use to measure ROI of social media. It will be interesting to see how these new tools will cope with the fast changing social media landscape. 

Paul - good point. It addresses Mr. Roques question below and I tend to side with Scott, it's hard to connect these dots to SM alone. It seems to me that the consequence of it is that there's a lot of factors that work their way into the ROI analysis and it seems that the folks that measure this are getting a good workout in trying to make good (and accurate) sense of the numbers.