Okay, so I’m going to declare that, henceforth and forthwith, the phrase “social media ROI” will not appear in my blog entries. The more I think about it, the more I really do not like the implication that we’re in search of a holy grail comprised of a mythical numerator divided by a magical denominator.

It’s just not out there, people. And, anyone who tells you something different is one step away from selling you oceanfront property in North Dakota.

Rather, the key is to focus on having clear objectives for your social media endeavors. I’ve prattled on at length about that since my very first post in this blog. And, it’s not really rocket science. It’s almost comical how quickly the (polite) dog pack descends when a newbie to the Yahoo! webanalytics group posts a question such as, “I’ve just been put in charge of web analytics and reporting for my company. Can someone point me to a list of good metrics I should be using?” Invariably, a half-dozen people respond simultaneously — their responses passing in the ether like ships in a dense fog — saying the same basic thing: “It depends on what the purpose of your site is. Start with understanding that, establishing clear objectives, and then reading Eric Peterson…”

In this sense, the rules are not really any different for social media. Connie Bensen posted a great start on her blog (I need to find out how that is progressing, but my guess is that she’s so busy speaking at conferences and visiting the ACDSee mother ship that she’s struggling to find time to work on it).

So, it’s critical to start with, “What do you hope to accomplish?” and measure from there. I’ve been having an interesting exchange with Kevin Sasser about his The Sales Wars blog on this subject. It turns out, he and I had some similar reasons for starting our respective blogs (and I doubt we are all that unique). In both cases, we found ourselves talking a lot — telling war stories in his case, and mounting a soap box in mine — and we were curious as to just how much we had to say. Could we sustain a blog for any meaningful period of time? Kevin has shown that, between the two of us, he has more to say. I can’t say I’m all that surprised! It turns out, this sort of objective is fairly easy to measure — just count posts over time and see if it reaches a plateau or whether it fades away like an operating system called OS/2.

We both, I think, were also interested in building a personal brand of some sort. Social media and Web 2.0 are really forcing companies to embrace the personal brands of their employees every bit as much as they focus on their corporate brands…but that’s way off topic for this blog (check out Chris Brogan if you want to learn more — he touches on the subject regularly). Measuring personal brand is a bit trickier. But, if that’s an objective, then simply sitting back and writing blog entries is not enough — you’ve got to get out there and engage with all forms of social media — Twitter, Facebook groups, LinkedIn questions, and the like. This is one where volume matters as much as quality — unless you have genius and insight that is so far beyond most humans that you can simply write a post or two and have everyone flock to read what you say…you’ve got to get out and participate. Again, this is not terribly difficult to measure. One way to make it difficult is to try to measure the number of discrete “posts” you author. A much easier way is to set a goal — just like you may set a goal to hit the gym 4 times a week — to spend some amount of time every day engaging in social media. I’ve accepted that I’m never going to be updating Twitter like Chris Brogan or Jeremiah Owyang. It just ain’t going to happen. But, I can show up at work a little early or peck around in the evenings to engage in areas where I have a passion.

“But, there’s no evidence of real value there, is there?” you ask. Well, yes and no. There is a leap of logic involved, but is that really a problem? Is social media going to go away? No. It’s not pole sitting, hula hoops, or the NHL. It’s a nascent phenomenon that people are finding ways to use in new and different ways every day.

So, that’s my conclusion of this wildly lengthy post — take a small bite out of the social media elephant and just measure your (or your company’s) outbound involvement. Blog posts, blog comments, questions answered, ideas shared. There is value there, but you may not see revenue hit the books next week or the week after. So don’t try to start by searching for a numerator and denominator that will be hopelessly illusive.

And by “Yet another post…” I mean “in the blogosphere.” I do believe this will be my first post on the subject. But, I’m planning to dive into this topic a bit more heavily in the coming days — not in small part because we have a new client who is interested in the subject, so I’ve got an excuse to do some research and cogitating!

Let’s be clear from the get-go here, though. “Social media ROI” is a rather silly term in my book. While I am absolutely a proponent of measuring your forays into social media, “ROI” implies a sillily simplistic concept. ROI is a simple formula conceptually, but it is almost always harder to calculate in practice. In the case of social media, tying either a strict dollar amount to the “return” or a strict dollar amount to the “investment” is downright impossible.

Now, one cute way to address this it to say that “return on influence is the new ROI.” Joe Marchese has a great post that explains this concept. The idea is that jumping directly from investment in social media to financial returns is wildly oversimplistic. Return on influence claims that what social media directly delivers is influence — an audience that can be reached out to quickly and effectively with whatever message the owner of that social media realm wishes. If that influence can be measured, then the return that is being achieved based on that influence can be measured.

I like the concept and the thinking…but could really live without the term. Let ROI be ROI, and lets talk about measuring the results of our social media investments. Please!

More to come…I promise.

This is a bit of a departure from the normal “data” theme of this blog. But, I’ve been spending a lot of time working on some initiatives around “lead lifecycle management” at Bulldog Solutions, and I thought the article below might be of interest to some of the followers of this blog.

The teaser:

“As your prospects receive a staggering volume of e-mail, the time they have to digest your message is increasingly short (and anti-spam tools that err on the side of over-filtering can prevent your e-mail from reaching their inboxes in the first place). Find out what BtoB marketers can do to make an impact on their lead marketing program when their communications are but a drop in a vast uncharted sea. ”

To read all of part 1: http://www.bulldogsolutions.com/Newsletters/articles/LLM_1007.html.

If you’re just itching to read part 2, I’ve got both parts available as a PDF — just let me know and I’ll shoot it your way!

Seth Godin has started a list on Squidoo for business cliches. I added “data driven.” The list itself is an interesting read, although I definitely found myself struggling as to whether a particular cliche should be voted up or down. For instance, “core competency” is definitely a cliche…but it’s also a fundamental, meaningful business concept, and, in my experience, I more often than not see it used in a meaningful way (as in, “We can/should outsource that, as it’s really not our core competency.”). Should that get an up vote or a down vote?

“Next Generation” on the other hand, bugs the crap out of me. And, at my last company, it seemed like half of the internal IT projects had that label stuck on the front of them. My beef with that cliche is that it is as short-sighted as the term “modern architecture.” If you label something “next generation” and then it rolls out, don’t you look a little silly referring to it as the “next generation”? That’s the nice thing about version numbering, even if you play games with deciding whether something is version 1.5 or version 2.0, you can still have an easily understandable reference point. Of course “Web 2.0” is becoming a cliche…which is probably why I read something yesterday (can’t remember exactly where) where the author was being clever and referring to “Web 3.0.” I digress. Given my personal take on “Next Generation,” should I give it an up vote or a down vote? Does the top of the list represent the most overused, most now-meaningless cliches…or does the top of the list represent the cliches that are heavily used but meaningful? Probably the former, based on Godin’s introduction, but it’s not entirely clear.

I do really like the concept of this sort of list. I’m a big James Surowiecki fan — his column is a must read in The New Yorker each week, and The Wisdom of Crowds is a great book. Hah! Another cliche in the making! I’ve bumped into people who have not actually read the book but who, nonetheless, rattle off the concepts it covers. Surowiecki actually does a great job of distinguishing between different types of “wisdom” and different types of “crowds” and which types of crowds are wise under which types of circumstances.

It will be interesting to see how Godin’s list evolves over time.