I agree with Shel Holtz that measuring money is not as important as measuring what he calls ‘cost (risk) benefit analysis.’

In the blog PR-Squared, a post talks about how determining ROI on social media marketing is complicated and can be considered a waste of time to figure out all the calculations. Everything I have read about measuring social media strategies is confusing because there is not an easy way to determine the effectiveness. Each company can measure page views or outcomes in sales, but sometimes just trying to provide good social media is the best you can do. Marketing and social media efforts are part of a cause and effect effort to improve the company, but do not always produce direct results. The difficulty behind measuring social media, as in the PR-Squared post, was “trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable.” Social media efforts can be measured if there was a clear objective for the social media efforts in the beginning to track results. http://www.pr-squared.com/2008/11/roi_for_social_media_marketing.html