As social media and social media platforms increasingly become promising targets for marketing professionals, the question of return on investment (ROI) of social media campaigns is gaining in prominence, specifically in comparison with the returns generated by alternative marketing initiatives and tactics that can be employed. The case for ROI Social media is obviously a new phenomenon, and therefore social media measurement models are still undeveloped, but a number of individuals in the social media arena have made attempts to address existing confusion and lay down some basic ground rules. While many in the field have compiled lists of key performance indicators (KPIs) by which the success of social media initiatives can potentially be measured, Olivier Blanchard and Jacob Morgan, among others, quite correctly emphasize that ROI is by definition a financial equation that specifies the correlation between an investment and its financial return.

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SOCIAL MEDIA DRIVING A PARADIGM SHIFT IN CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS Remember the days when the corporate C-suite could comfortably live with the illusion that they were able to control corporate messaging; press releases were carefully crafted by the PR team, reviewed and revised multiple times by senior executives until the message was considered ready for prime-time. Once the release was distributed, the PR team was then tasked with ‘obtaining ink’, capitalizing on their carefully –or not so carefully– nurtured relationships with the media.

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