Member Avatar for MktgRob

I was just reading a blog by a social media and marketing teacher and he used a term, Return on Conversation, that he then seemed to dismiss. But I am curious if there is a way to measure return on conversation in social media. I do agree with his point that ROI for social media is probably pointless because a lot of social media can be done for free (with the exception of manhours). Does anyone thing they could come up with a formula to measure return on conversation?

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A practical way to handle "Return on Conversation" is to start with a clear business outcome and then treat conversations as measurable contributors to that outcome. This pulls together ’s concern about tying conversations to value, ’s point about setting KPIs per channel, and ’s emphasis on building a measurement framework—then turns that into a repeatable process you can test and improve.

  1. Pick one outcome to monetize (a sale, a qualified lead, renewal, etc.).
  2. Define a short list of conversation-derived events that can reasonably influence that outcome. Estimate a conversion probability for each event from historical data or a conservative benchmark.
  3. Instrument those events so they can be tracked back to conversation sources (unique links, tagged campaigns, CRM fields, promo codes, or chat identifiers).
  4. Assign monetary value, measure costs, and run incrementality tests (holdouts or A/B tests) when possible.
Attribution_Value = sum(Event_Count * Event_Value * Attribution_Weight)

RoC = (Attribution_Value - Conversation_Cost) / Conversation_Cost

Event_Value is typically Outcome_Value * Conversion_Probability. Conversation_Cost should include people, tools, creative and any paid distribution. Use a short attribution window at first, then expand to capture lifetime value if the business model supports it.

Common pitfalls: low sample sizes make attribution noisy — use proxies and cohort comparisons; correlation is not causation — validate with holdouts; overly complex weighting produces fragile results — start simple and iterate. This approach makes "return on conversation" actionable: it forces a link from talk to business impact, and gives a testable number you can improve over time.

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Member Avatar for bobchrist

To measure return on conversation in social media is massive challenge, I hope you'll need key performance indicators for each module to track the conversation like if you've developed few apps for specific social module. you can be able to track users and their engagement with that applications.

Member Avatar for InsightsDigital

I actually developed a metrix grid for measuring various social media. The metrics were more qualitative in nature but I tried to make it somewhat quantitative and universal.
For example:
Wikis
Numbers of Members
# Number of Contributing Posts
# Number of Revisions
# of active members
Feedback/Comment on Blog
# of Comments
# of likes
Type of Comments
Sentiments - # of neutral; # of positive; # negative; # self promoters

Member Avatar for MktgRob

I actually developed a metrix grid for measuring various social media. The metrics were more qualitative in nature but I tried to make it somewhat quantitative and universal.
For example:
Wikis
Numbers of Members
# Number of Contributing Posts
# Number of Revisions
# of active members
Feedback/Comment on Blog
# of Comments
# of likes
Type of Comments
Sentiments - # of neutral; # of positive; # negative; # self promoters

Sounds interesting. I am going to try to set up something similar. How did you use the results to quantify the efforts and were you able to tie specific sales to specific conversations?

Member Avatar for InsightsDigital

The site I created these metrics was a lead generator site so instead of sales, me and the client created the metrics to have instead of sales, have it as "completed contact me forms".

Member Avatar for MktgRob

The site I created these metrics was a lead generator site so instead of sales, me and the client created the metrics to have instead of sales, have it as "completed contact me forms".

Understood. I think the social media channel in question will determine what metrics work best and how to capture them.

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