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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