Base One Beliefs #4: I would like to believe that the 'R' in ROI doesn't always have to be about money

I was at a conference recently on Social Media Monitoring. During a panel session, someone asked a question about measuring the ROI for Social Media activities. The panel did their best to respond, but admitted that it was still difficult to establish a direct link between Social Media marketing and revenue generated. One by one (and there were five of them), they came out with different versions of the same story: 'we know that our activities generated revenue, but it wasn't really possible to track it. It was hugely successful, though.'

By the fifth response, I was getting really frustrated. Not because of this failure to measure revenue, but because they were immediately associating the ROI for Social Media marketing WITH Revenue.
 
Different marketing activities generate different types of result. Some results are easier to equate to revenue than others. Can we measure the exact revenue generated by an above the line, branding campaign for instance? Social Media Marketing is all about generating conversations. These conversations can be about different subjects, and can take place on different platforms, even cross between platforms. They can also influence people to find out more by using other tools such as search, or plant a brand name in their mind meaning that at some future point they click on a banner. There's no way therefore that we can (or should try to) measure the revenue generated by a Social Media campaign.
 
Instead of thinking of 'R' for Revenue (yes, I know it's 'R' for Return, but I want to make the point), we should be thinking of 'R' for Results, and with Social Media these come in many forms:

-    The number of conversations started
-    The number of people involved in those conversations
-    The mood of the conversations and reactions to them
-    The number of Retweets
-    The number of new followers recruited
-    The number of new links generated

and..... the number of clicks generated, where and if we can measure them.

All of the above represent Results, and all of the above are a measure of success - just a different measure from those that we have become used to with 'traditional' on-line marketing. With Social Media, we are very much concerned with influencing potential buyers higher up the funnel, a no less important activity, but one step removed from revenue generation. Let's therefore judge performance in a realistic way, so that success can be clearly proved and celebrated, rather than attempting to present it using irrelevant and inconsistent metrics.