Retailers have various marketing tools at their disposal to generate sales, with each seeing different results.

The ROI from catalog marketing is low relative to other online and offline media, including e-mail, Internet search and direct-response newspaper ads. The reason is that catalogs are expensive to produce.

Catalogs are forecast to generate $7.34 in sales for every dollar spent to make and mail them in 2010, according to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA). This is a slight increase over 2009 and, in turn, 2008. Catalog ROI could be understated since it is difficult to track online sales that are influenced by catalog shopping.

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The following are some notes I threw together while sitting in on a conference on how to measure ROI in Facebook:

• Relentless Marketing

• Budget Allocation vs. Marketing Mix decisions

• Social Media can’t be in a Silo, it needs to be mixed with everything you are doing.

• Not to just get more fans, about driving the top line or bottom line for your business

• Social Media Analytics is not Data Overlay

• Social media analytics needs attribution

• Social Media Done Right

• Business Objective – Increase ad revenue

• Marketing Objective – Increase registrations

• Success Metric – Conversion events

• Marketing Channel – Social Media

1. Flickr
2. YouTube
3. Twitter
4. Facebook

• Used to push content and difficult to track

• Strategic Implication: Brand

• Authentic, Personal, Responsive

• Relationships and Cultivation

• Combat Perceptions, Stereotypes and Scandals

• Session Loyalty = 30 day backwards looking first Click Sessions over Sessions same session

• More session loyalty on facebook

• -Conversion Efficiency= event completing sessions over sessions

• Facebook Referrals converting more than anything else.

• Can’t rely on click through analysis alone on Facebook

• Facebook insites, doesnt report on total engagement with page.

• Need Unique visits and more

• can’t judge from 12 interactions a day

• Seton Hall on the Web, installed static FBML to fan page and embedded calls to module itself

• **Edit settings, edit FBML html and embedd image tag. ****Install Static FBML call

• Static FBML page** how to get better read?

• construct image tag

• instructions on coremetrix

• embbed image tag

• impression attribution in Facebook*****

I spent a good portion of Sunday and Monday thinking about social media measurement and proving return on investment or ROI. Many of the sessions at PRSA International in Detroit were about social media, web-based communications strategies and the requisite question of how do we report success. Fortunately for PRSA (Public Relations Society of America), Katie Delahaye Paine was on hand to present and share her considerable expertise in the subject.

I attended both a roundtable discussion session, one component of which was a talk with Katie (I reported it for PRSA’s blog) and a session called, “How to derive ROI from Interactive Communication,” presented by Joanne Puckett of Ketchum. The confluence of all the thought, which I’ve outlined some salient points from below, really led me to one clear thought:

The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable.

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