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As social media marketing continues to take more share of the budget, more of us need to spend time considering ways to 'prove' value.

Additionally with the social media spending increases, comes:
• Increased executive scrutiny,
• Challenges from other stakeholders who may be losing budget to these efforts.

This is driving the need for better social media measurement and return on investment (ROI) accountability.

Throughout 2010, the top priority reported by almost all our clients undertaking a social media program was to create ROI Measurements for internal programs. One, to justify the program and support the initial business case and secondly, with proof of effectiveness the ability to go back to management obtain more budget funding.

As with most campaigns, you can take historical KPI's and use them again in future programs. To an extent this can work in social media campaigns as well but it is establishing just what these initial measures should be that causes so much internal debate. The fact is, there is not right answer as different stakeholders are looking at different goals and objectives. The Marketer could be measuring the 'volume' of buzz and the 'authors' creating this buzz, where Comms & PR folks are looking at the 'sentiment' and 'reach' of this buzz. Sales/Bis Dev folks, they just want top of mind (brand building) and sales (revenues) so how do you tie that back to the social media camapign that may run over the course of 6-12 months?

The social media analyics vendors are all scrambling to develop tools (ourselves included) that can easlier show the various organizational constituents the KPI's that make sence to them. I would suggest that the sustainability of funding for social media is at risk in enterprises that are not able to demonstrate solid business cases for these initiatives.