14. The Outro: Return on Investment

What's good y'all? This week's post is my final post of the semester for ITEC 335: Social Media & Business but don't get too sad because I plan on blogging from time to time on a variety of topics. Anyways, this week I read about how to measure social media ROI in articles by Aaron Uhrmacher and Jeremiah Owyang.

Social media ROI is something that no one seems to agree on how to measure. Uhrmacher believes that in order to measure ROI you must have a specific metric or set of metrics in mind before you begin such as corporate reputation or customer relationships. Once you have chosen your metric you must benchmark with yourself. If you want to measure how successful your SEO is then you can use tools such as Omniture or Google Analytics. This type of measure is far more quantitative. Owyang agrees with Uhrmachers guidelines and adds that we must also keep in mind "new" vs "old" media along with measuring new attributes that come along with this "new" media.

Social media is something that is constantly evolving and because of this there will never be a formula for how to measure social ROI. I do think that the guidelines by Uhrmacher and Owyang are a good start. Each company must decide what they are trying to measure and why because without a definite reason/goal for measurement then all of the analytics websites in the world won't help you improve your business.

I want to end this post by saying that it's been a pleasure to blog this semester and that this is something I never thought I would get interested but now I can see why so many people blog and its value to the business world.

Signing off for now but don't forget to check out my future posts!

PEACE.