Social Media ROI: Are we comparing like with like?
[Summary: To measure social media ROI we need to know about the ROI of paper-based outreach]
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.

