The account, @InsideTheBCS, launched on Thursday and has, since then, accumulated nearly 700 followers. There’s no hint about who might be posting the tweets, although one blog suggests the BCS may have farmed the task out to PR agency HDMK, since the first two people to follow the newly-minted account were HDMK staffers, neither of whom returned calls.

One tweet seems to be signed by Bill Hancock, the new BCS executive director.

Regardless of who’s behind the account, it has been savaged in a number of quarters since it first appeared. A Twitter search I conducted moments ago produced several pages of messages, even though @InsideTheBCS itself has tweeted only 30 times as of this writing.

To the credit of whoever’s writing the tweets, several are responses to what others have said, and some are responses to critical comments. But with hundreds of comments swirling around Twitter, it’s evident that @InsideTheBCS is picking and choosing which comments warrant response. There seems to be no rhyme or reason behind these choices.

The core problem, though, is that nobody seems to have considered the inevitability of BCS haters piling on the account the instant it went public. (Disclosure: I’m no fan myself.) Outside of the NCAA, there is broad consensus that a real playoff system is needed to more fairly determine a national champion. It’s not just the fans who believe that, but also many college football coaches.

So it comes as no surprise to see a surge of criticism aimed at @InsideTheBCS for its insistence on the complex mathematical computations that it uses to determine who will play whom in the post-season. In fact, one tweet from @InsideTheBCS quoted Florida coach Urban Meyer claiming the BCS “has been great for college football. It’s not perfect, but it has been great for college football.” This led to another tweet pointing out that Meyer told the New York Times, “The system is a failure. You’ve got to blow it up and start over” and another that completed the quote cited by @InsideTheBCS: “Followed by laughing and: ‘Now I need to go prep for Fla International!’”

A third tweet suggested that Meyer’s praise was based on his even deeper disdain for the system that preceded the BCS “that screwed out even more teams because of traditional games.”

Much of the piling on has been led by Yahoo sportswriter Dan Wetzel, who has been tweeting quotes from prominent NCAA coaches expressing their disdain for the BCS and otherwise leading the attack with tweets like this one: “It’s a good thing the BCS hired an executive director to ‘educate the fans.’ This Twitter feed is genius.”

@InsideTheBCS has responded defensively to a few tweets calling for a playoff series, and has otherwise posted tweets trying to convince everone the system works.

But it’s not convincing anybody.

While the BCS may have been unprepared for the volume of vitriol the Twitter feed has produced, it hasn’t surprised anyone else. At one blog by a fan of a college team, a post introducing @InsideTheBCS reads, “Oh no they didn’t!! They can’t be serious. People are going to unload on these guys!! This will be pure comedy…” And a comment left to that post responds, “Read their posts. Total propoganda. Let’em rip!”

The BCS had two choices: Forego a Twitter account of be prepared to truly engage college football fans in a real discussion about the system. The approach the BCS has taken, however, only opens the organization up to even greater ridicule and fans the flames of discontent.

Of course, I’m willing to give the BCS time to figure out its mistake and make a mid-course correction to its approach to Twitter. So far, however, so bad.

Content summary: Mitch Joel’s book offer; FIR Interview with Tac Anderson coming; update on the FIR Twitter List; FIR #500: more listener predictions; Dan York reports; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: Ronna Porter’s example on calling on your online community to verify your social media credentials in a job application, social media is influencing business decisions says new research from SNCR; David Philips reports; listener comments; music from Mario Tomic; and more.

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Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for November 19, 2009: A 65-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #502 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

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So, until Monday November 23…

I would classify this under “blinding flashes of the obvious,” but it still jumped out at me because Forrester is suggesting that these industries—which include heavily regulated businesses like pharmaceuticals—will get the experience they need and move forward.

The Forrester report—US Interactive Marketing Forecast by Industry, 2009 to 2014 (which’ll set you back $1,749)—projects most growth coming from big offline advertisers, including media and entertainment, consumer goods, automotive, and healthcare. The report projects an 18% compound annual growth rate for healthcare and pharmaceuticals, which (along with the other offline advertisers) are currently being outspent by industries that routinely market directly to consumers. But the online experience these companies are gaining in their early experimentations with interactive marketing will drive future growth, according to Shar VanBoskirk, the report’s author. VanBoskirk notes:

Early social media trials for NEXIUM, Prilosec OTC, and AMBIEN CR have exceeded AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals’ Procter & Gamble’s, and sanofi-aventis’ expectations, respectively, paving the way for more investment.

The report also predicts that business-to-business investment in interactive marketing will remain strong, which flies in the face of all the naysayers who insist that social media works best in the B2C marketplace. Interactive marketing in the B2B space will grow from $2.3 billion now to $4.8 billion in 2014, with adoption of newer techniques and improved sophistication of the efforts already underway, the report says. (Social media, of course, is just one of the categories of interactive marketing, which also includes search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, and mobile marketing.)

Overall, interactive marketing will account for nearly one-fifth of all marketing dollars by 2014, representing $55 billion worth of marketing budgets. The consequences of this shift from traditional to interactive marketing include smaller budgets in general and the demise of agencies that haven’t kept pace, according to the report.

Content summary: Reflections on FIR #500; FIR Interview with Steve Rubel is published; Michael Netzley reports from Singapore; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; more comments from listeners about FIR #500; News That Fits: beating back bad press with Google AdWords, are you actually ready and able to listen and do social media monitoring?; listener comments discussion; music from The Plastic Pals; and more.

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Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for November 16, 2009: A 62-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Concord, California, USA.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #501 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Thursday November 19…

The question of CEO blogging keeps coming up. Opinions mostly fall in two camps:

• All CEOs should blog. As the leaders and chief communicators of their organizations, it is incumbent on CEOs to represent their companies in the social space where so much influence is wielded.
• No CEOs should blog. Because of regulations that govern the kinds of statements CEOs can make, and when, there is just too much risk that an innocent remark could result in a fine.

As with most things, though, the question of CEO blogging is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Clearly CEOs can blog, as evidenced by the number of CEOs who do.

If your CEO is considering blogging, have him or her answer these questions before taking the plunge:

Are you the best person in the company to assume this role?

In the early days of corporate blogging, GM launched one of the earliest blogs penned by a senior executive. It wasn’t then-CEO Rick Wagoner, but rather Vice Chairman Bob Lutz. The decision was based on the fact that the most compelling kinds of conversations GM could have would be about cars, not the automotive business. Since Lutz was the most senior executive with direct responsibility for the vehicles GM produced, he became the executive blogger. Wagoner did post from time to time, when it was important for the CEO’s voice to be associated with the message, using a different company blog.

The focus of the blog is also the key to the next question:

Are you willing to blog about what your stakeholders want to talk about?

Far too many corporate and CEO blogs are filled with material the company wants to push to audiences. While this may make leaders feel good about using a blog, odds are that readers won’t flock to it. These messages are being pushed to them through any number of channels. For a blog to succeed, you need to start conversations about topics your stakeholders want to talk about. Do you know what those topics are? And are you prepared to address them, even if they’re not always what you think is important? If you do focus on topics your readers care about, it becomes easier to digress from time to time with topics you want to share with them. The more the blog becomes a locus of conversation and community, the more interested your readers will be in some of the issues you want to put on the table.

Are you ready to engage your stakeholders in conversation?

The point is debatable, but I don’t believe you have a blog unless you’re publishing reader comments. Without comments enabled, you’re just using blogging software to publish a column. Leaders who blog need to be ready to pay attention to reader feedback and input, and even engage in it. This doesn’t mean a CEO needs to actually read every comment left to his blog, particularly if it becomes popular and attracts hundreds of comments for every post. At some companies, a staff reads the comments, aggregates them based on their topics and sentiment, and delivers a summary report to the executive. Some executives engage directly in the comment while others simply write a follow-up post acknowledging what he heard from readers. But to view an executive blog as just one more one-way, top-down channel is to dramatically reduce the likelihood that stakeholders will pay attention to it. These are people who have come to expect interaction as part of the blogging experience.

Are you willing to commit to posting something regularly—that you’ve written yourself?

You can post as often as you like, but you must post at least weekly (three times a week is better) in order to build momentum, to build the expectation that you’re going to be opening discussions.

This is not a task you can offload to a PR staffer, the way you could when your byline appeared under the ghost-written CEO column that appeared on the inside front cover of the employee magazine. The whole idea underlying a blog is that it’s an authentic, honest message that you wanted to deliver and open for conversation. Nothing is more disingenuous than saying, “This is my blog, I’ve started it so we can have a dialogue about our business, but I’m not really writing it; it’s just not important enough for me to commit that kind of time.”

Your blog doesn’t need to take all that much time. In response to CEOs who have told me they don’t have the time to write a 1,500-word blog post, I respond, “That’s good; your readers don’t have time to read a 1,500-word blog post.” Short, pithy observations, explanations, and reports are ideal. What’s more, you don’t have to actually type anything. Marriott International CEO Bill Marriott dictates his posts into a digital recorder, which is transcribed (word for word) by his staff. At HP, a senior executive calls his posts into a voice-mail box established just for that purpose; his messages are also transcribed by staff for posting.

Ultimately, though, your view should be that you don’t have time not to blog. You should recognize what other CEOs—like Thomas Nelson Publishers CEO Michael Hyatt—have realized: that blogging ultimately saves time by reducing the more time-consuming communications that eat into your day. If you blog well, you’ll find that you’ve reallocated much of the time you spent less efficiently with other channels to your blog.

Are you well-schooled in what you can’t say?

Bill Marriott, CEO of Marriott International, writes about topics that will never cause regulatory problems. His posts talk about his staff, Marriott’s corporate social responsibility efforts, and other topics that would never raise an eyebrow at the SEC. Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, on the other hand, does blog about the business side of Sun, but is savvy enough about the regulations that govern his words that he is able to avoid writing anything that would cause him trouble. Do you know enough about the regulations, what kinds of off-the-cuff remarks might be viewed as a material forward-looking statement or a revelation about earnings? If not, don’t blog.

Of course, if you’re with a privately held company not subject to SEC rules, this isn’t as important a consideration, although you should keep in mind that there are agencies regulating your business besides the SEC.

Are you prepared to talk about bad news and unpleasant topics?

Your blog cannot be all happy talk, even when your company is hit with bad news. Candor and credibility are contingent upon your being willing to address the issues about which your stakeholders want to hear from you. Are you ready to tackle bad news on your blog and to hear what your stakeholders have to say about it?

If you answer “no” to any of these questions, then you’re not a likely candidate for a CEO blog.

There are alternatives, however, if you’re bound and determined to have your CEO voice heard in the socialmedia space:

• Group blogs—Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly posts an occasional item to the Nuts About Southwest blog, but only when the CEO’s voice needs to be heard. The blog is ready and available to him because of the community of Southwest employees who keep it populated with a wide variety of posts.
• Facebook—A fan page on Facebook affords you an opportunity to create content stakeholders might be interested in and then add a CEO commentary only when the occasion calls for it.
• Video—If your concern is that you’re not the world’s greatest writer, you could always opt for a video blog, speaking (not reading) your comments to a camera. There’s actually a tangible benefit to this approach: Your stakeholders can look into your eyes while you’re talking to them. You can upload your videos to a YouTube channel and embed the YouTube videos in your blog, making it easy for others to spread your words across other channels.

What other criteria should a CEO consider before undertaking a blog?

Here are some other CEOs who blog:

• Paul Levy, CEO, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
• John Mackey, CEO, Whole Foods Markets
• Mike Critelli, now-retired Executive Chairman, Pitney Bowes
• Richard Edelman, Edelman Public Relations

There are many other CEO bloggers. Whose CEO blog would you point to as an excellent example?

If there’s one significant voice in the PR profession that attracts attention and influences opinion within the industry and outside of it on a global scale, that voice is Steve Rubel: PR practitioner at Edelman Digital, blogging pioneer, social media early adopter and evangelist, geek, re-inventor and lifestreamer.

In this FIR Interview, co-hosts Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz talk with Steve on a wide range of topics that stimulate his insight and commentary, including lifestreaming – what is it and why Steve’s doing it – the Posterous platform, the Micro Persuasion and Steve Rubel brands, organizations and public relations practice, his experiments with the iPhone as a unique platform, and much more.

Get this podcast:

• Download the MP3 file 12.4Mb, 30:56)
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About our Conversation Partner

Steve Rubel, SVP, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, is responsible for keeping Edelman and its clients in the vanguard. He studies global technology, media and online trends and shapes them into actionable insights and marketing communications strategies.

In his role, Rubel has served as senior strategic advisor to Edelman clients such as Dannon, HP, PepsiCo, Zagat, Unilever, Microsoft and many others.

Rubel supports the account planning processes, intellectual property development and the firm’s innovation and business development efforts. He is a member of the Edelman Digital senior leadership committee.

His writings on emerging technology has been called must-read by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CNET, PC Magazine and Forrester Research. In addition, he is actively followed by more than 28,000 on Twitter, writes a bi-weekly column for Advertising Age and is often sought by the press and as a keynote speaker.

Rubel has been named to several prestigious lists, including: PR Week’s 40 Under 40, The Forbes.com Web Celeb 25, PC Magazine’s 100 Favorite Blogs, Media Magazine’s Media 100, the AlwaysOn/Technorati Open Media 100 and the CNET News.com Blog 100.

Prior to joining Edelman in 2006, Rubel worked for 15 years in a variety of marketing communications positions in corporate, non-profit and small/mid-sized PR firms. Most recently, he spent five years at CooperKatz & Company where he pioneered the use of blogs as a marketing vehicle for clients such as the Association of National Advertisers, simplehuman, and Vespa.

Related FIR Interview podcasts:

• FIR Interview: Steve Rubel, Edelman – December 22, 2006
• An Open Conversation with Steve Rubel, Micro Persuasion – March 21, 2005.

Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future interviews, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

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This FIR Interview is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

Podsafe music - On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.

Content summary: Welcome to the 500th episode; upcoming FIR Interview with Steve Rubel; Edelman launches TweetLevel while Waggener Edstrom prepares to launch TwendZ Pro; Dan York reports from Orlando, Florida; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop. What will FIR be reporting on and talking about in the next 500 shows? We consider and comment on insights and predictions from FIR listeners Ricardo in Costa Rica, Mathew Lowry, Bob Crawshaw, Keith Childs, Bernie Goldbach, Sallie Goetsch, Norbert Mayer-Wittman and Tony Molloy, and thank listeners whose comments online we found via the #FIR500 hashtag; listener comments discussion (the regular one); music from Aloud; and more.

Get FIR:

• Download the MP3 file (32.5Mb, 81:13)
• Subscribe to the RSS feed
• Get the show at iTunes

Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for October 15, 2009: An 81-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #500 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Monday November 16…

Curious about why I’d want to favorite a DM, I replied to Dan about what he had in mind. His answer: “Where can you favorite a DM? I don’t see the option either in the Twitter web interface or in Tweetdeck.” When I let him know that the tip had appeared in his DM to me, he replied, “Wow…wacky…I have know idea how or *why* you would favorite a DM.” In other words, the tip hadn’t come from Dan. Somewhere, somebody inserted it.

I did a bit of investigating and found that CC Chapman is also curious about these mysterious tips:

I don’t know that I’d call it spam, exactly, since there’s no link and it’s not promoting anything. But it certainly creates confusion by leading you to think that the tip was written by the person sending you the message. You also have to wonder whether whoever is creating these tips can start using them for more spam-like purposes.

Whoever’s doing this needs to stop. Adding text to somebody else’s private message is a very, very bad idea.

But like any tool, Technorati’s usefulness vanishes if it’s broken. And Technorati has been broken in a big way for some time. What’s more, they don’t seem to be very interested in fixing it.

For years, this blog has included two Technorati links. One is a widget that displays the blog’s Technorati authority; the other is a link to a Technorati page that lists blogs that have linked to mine. A while back, Technorati relaunched its site with a new design. Suddenly, the long list of blogs linking to mine disappeared; the page now shows zero blogs linking to this one. (Google Blogsearch shows more than 4,000.)

What’s more, the authority on my widget shows 132, but a visit to my blog’s Technorati page reveals an authority of 525.

My rank is showing up as 3,930—not bad if it’s accurate, but given the other issues, to say I’m skeptical is putting a positive spin on the situation.

And that’s the problem. It’s not about my ego and needing to know that people are blogging about my posts (I get that information from Google’s Blogsearch). It’s about trusting Technorati when looking up information about other bloggers. I have no confidence in Technorati, and therefore can no longer use it in my work. I trust the Oakland Raiders to score multiple passing touchdowns in a single game more than I trust Technorati to give me usable results for any blog I’m researching.

A couple weeks ago, when this situation really started to bug me, I did some searching and found that Technorati has a Get Satisfaction page addressing the problem. The explanation from Technorati deals with a long-standing problem with producing good results and the solution, which involves “work(ing) from a clean data set.” The post continues:

Sites that we have added to the clean index are being crawled, having detailed authority calculated, display recent posts (one at the moment) on our site, and contribute to other sites authority. We are continuously adding more and more sites to this index, and are working on ways to do so faster, but as you can imagine, the volume of sites to qualify is enormous.

An impressive number of comments follow the post, none of them happy. A typical comment reads something like, “My blog has lost all of its 2 years authority, plus it’s not showing recent posts and its screenshot is very old. Please help.”

Technorati isn’t responding to any of the comments (as they did occasionally at the outset) and reports of the problems being fixed are more rare than sightings of wild condors in downtown Manhattan, leading to comments like this one: “I’d suggest that either Technorati or Get Satisfaction are ignoring this thread as there don’t seem to be any recent responses to points raised by bloggers.”

I understand that processes can take time, but for a professional service, the response from Technorati is abysmal. The problem is knowing where else to go for comparable metrics on blogger influence.

It goes without saying: Technorati FAIL.

Of course, it’s common to talk about return on investment more casually. You invest time, money, and resources in an effort and want to know what you got out of it. It’s easy to refer to the results of your effort as ROI. And I understand that, outside of the C-Suite, ROI has assumed a variety of different meanings, all of which come down to the perceived value of an expense or investment.

I’m a huge believer in measurement as a foundation for any kind of communication effort, whether it’s PR, marketing, whatever. Budget-conscious executives are increasingly less likely to fund communications if they can’t see how the effort is helping the business achieve its goals, so it’s vital to be able to demonstrate the results our efforts have produced. It’s also critical so we can figure out what adjustments we need to make in order to improve the results.

While I do recognize that, in some cases, it’s possible to tease the actual ROI from a communication investment, most of the time it’s a guessing game to determine just how much money was generated in sales from the social media dimension of a company’s communications efforts. Ultimately, of course, any communication should be designed to support business goals, which at some point translates into money in the bank. But it’s usually impossible to determine exactly how much money, to the penny, fell to the company’s bottom line as a result of social efforts to bolster the firm’s reputation or tout a new product.

Thus, every time we go to executive management and claim we’ve achieved ROI using calculations that are out of synch with their understanding of what ROI is, we undermine our own credibility and reinforce the perception that communications people just don’t understand business.

The thing is, I don’t understand why we’re so obsessed with needing to prove ROI. We don’t. What we need to prove is that we have set objectives for our efforts that support business goals and that those efforts produced measurable results. That’s the kind of reporting that earns management respect and support for investment in communication.

It’s also the approach IABC—the International Association of Business Communicators—has been taking for at least as long as I’ve been a member (since 1977). To assess excellence in communication, IABC wants to know what objectives you set and how you can prove you achieved them. Nowhere does the label “ROI” appear in these criteria. Nowhere does it need to.

Consider, for example, the ongoing participation of several Dell staffers—Richard Binhammer and Lionel Menchaca, for instance—on Twitter. Their availability, their insights, their passion certainly have an impact on perceptions of Dell and the company’s reputation. These undoubtedly factor into decisions to buy. But is there a way Dell’s communications team can express the value of these contributions in precise dollars and cents? Clearly not.

On the other hand, Dell does an amazing job of assessing the shift in the sentiment of online discussion from negative into neutral and positive. The correlation between sales and negative sentiment has been long accepted by the most senior executives in almost every organization. Hence, proving that the communication effort has shifted sentiment is accepted as a valuable effort that supports business goals that lead to sales.

What about cost-avoidance, which I’ve always seen as a useful communication measure? Building strong relationships can prevent tthe need to spend money to address strikes, boycotts, costly legislation or regulation, and the like. Again, occupants of the C-Suite recognize this as valuable, but there’s no way to assign it a formal ROI calculation: Money we didn’t spend doesn’t show up anywhere on a P&L.

So I’m not suggesting that we don’t measure the impact of our social media efforts, nor am I suggesting that we can’t prove that there’s value produced for the resources invested. But for the sake of our own credibility, unless we can come up with the numbers that reflect the way management perceives it, we need to stop trying to claim that it’s ROI.