I have been really busy recently, with this launch and that, but in my spare time I have been reading quite a lot on the ROI of social media and scratching my head. As more and more of these amazing buzz monitoring tools spring up out of the woodwork providing us with this set of data and that, it seems the big question is still what is the return on investment from social media? Sure data is all good and well but unless you have someone with half a brain who can process that data and tell you why this spike in conversation took place it’s pretty much useless – as useless as giving a caveman a microwave. ...

If like most PR practitioners you are mildly interested in measuring ROI for a social media campaign. I would recommend you have a read of this presentation from Oliver Blanchard, in case you didn’t know, he is the principal at BrandBuilder Marketing in the US. In the presentation he looks at the various questions being asked by clients and agencies about measuring ROI for social media campaigns. I have recommended this as I particularly liked the tongue-in-cheek manner in which he has written it and the amusing speech bubbles he uses to get his point across. He examines the elements which are easily measurable and then he scrutinises the other things a client ...