The ROI of Social Media Marketing: More than Dollars and Cents | Forrester Blogs

An affective Social Media Marketing Balanced Scorecard considers metrics from four different perspectives:

1. Financial: Has revenue or profit increased or costs decreased?
2. Brand: Have consumer attitudes about the brand improved?
3. Risk Management: Is the organization better prepared to note and respond to attacks or problems that affect reputation?
4. Digital: Has the company enhanced its owned and earned digital assets?

Marketers who only seek to measure results in one of these perspectives get an incomplete picture and as a result are unable to make effective decisions about social media marketing investments.  It is only by recognizing all of the benefits delivered by social media marketing that the complete value of these efforts can be understood.

Very true statement on the ROI of Social Media Marketing. And as written last year in a (German language) blog entry, I doubt anyway the measurement of ROI in Marketing. We can or can not measure the financial (lead and deal generation) aspect of Social Media Marketing like we can or can not for other marketing instruments. All Marketing ROI measurement I have seen, always associate ROI to one marketing touchpoint. Completely wrong: A Sales process is a multitouch process, where Sales and Marketing do (hopefully) touch and convince prospects several times to buy. A deal is neither being exclusively generated and closed, because somebody visited the booth at a trade show nor because she or he has read a blog entry. No marketing measurment system I have seen really reflects the multtouch aspect of a sales process.