[Summary: To measure social media ROI we need to know about the ROI of paper-based outreach]

Credit: PhotoGraham - Creative Commons - (Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic) - http://www.flickr.com/photos/82278008@N00/283496355

If you've ever handed out a leaflet to a class of school students in tutorial you may be familiar with then finding 1/2 those leaflets dropped in the bin on the way out (recycling bin hopefully...).

If you look at the piles of paper on most office desks - and then ask the desk inhabitant how many of these documents they've actually read - and how many they've responded to in any way - you may well find their desk is collonised by many unread and unresponded too leaflets, magazines, reports and papers. Even though all those leaflets had a tear-off slip, and the magazines had a letters page.

Printing 1000 leaflets doesn't mean 1000 leaflets get read.

But leaflets don't report back how many people have read it.

A blog post does.