Do you measure social media with sales?

Does even the question seem odd to you? I mean, how can a blog entry or a social bookmark lead to a sale? I know that lots of social media is designed to generate awareness, rather than sales, just like many TV or print ads. I mean, sure, it’s possible for someone to measure how social media leads to a sale, but does anyone really measure social media success this way? My answer to that question is not yet, but just wait.

Image by Calamity Meg via Flickr

I’m doing a lot of work with clients lately on social media consulting and training, and I am always poking around as to what the business value is. Some clients think it’s an odd question. I’ve even had people tell me to avoid the subject because it will only confuse people.
I’m afraid that it’s me that’s confused.
If I said to you that we should spend precious time and money to optimize our Web site for search, but that we shouldn’t bother tracking whether any of those searchers bought anything, you’d think me a bit daft, wouldn’t you? I mean, we want to ring that cash register, don’t we? So why would we spend time attracting visitors to the site without tracking what happened?
Yet, that’s exactly what we do with social media. We get our message out, we attract people to our Web site using social media every day, but we don’t measure whether any sales happen.
Now, I realize that it’s harder to track sales from social media than from search. I understand that most people using social media are nowhere near being ready to purchase, unlike many searchers. But I don’t think we’ll be investing the proper amount in social media until we measure its impact.
If you can’t measure return on investment, you get a lot less investment.
When are we going to treat social media as a full-fledged member of the marketing mix? I think it’s the day after we can tell how much we make because we did some social media. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, if people don’t want to spend on social media, you can’t stop them. But if we knew that it was valuable, there’d be no stopping us.