One of the questions I get most in working with clients around word-of-mouth (WOM) and social media is:

How do we measure ROI?

The answer: Not sure.

Or perhaps, a better answer is the classic consulting one of: It depends.

The social media consulting world is desperately trying to figure this out...and it will.

Sort of.

Because social media is both about business (hence ROI), but also about relationships (how do you measure how people feel?)

On the ROI front:

I am "raving fan" for the book Groundswell and on their blog, the authors are diving into the question of social media ROI, as they should (and here).

Geoff Livingston and his team, social media thinkers I respect, has posted on this as well a few times.

On the relationship side, you could use the The Ultimate Question (and NetPromoter score) of Fred Reichheld (ht: Rohit Bhargava for his mention during his book signing event), but that's only one measure.

There's art and science to WOM/Social Media. The science part will get figured out.

The thing is...if you wait until everything is figured out, many of the massive opportunities will be gone.

Yes, there's some danger in "going West,  young man" but would you rather buy land in Las Vegas at 1950 or 1990 prices?

The Dutch bought all of Manhattan for $24 (let's leave politics out of it for now in favor of the larger point, shall we? ;-)

There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.