I also did a case study slam – social media and nonprofits – did a little “ask later” style – and had a few nonprofits tell their stories
http://socialmediametrics.wikispaces.com

Love Connie’s writings about ROI – and a great post. Thanks

I find it frustrating to hear people coming up with cutesy ROI adaptions like “return on influence” because they’re not useful: that’s punchy, but if you can’t measure the R and I the whole exercise is pointless. You’ve listed some great things to consider, but how do you measure them? Well, you don’t.

You estimate how they will change. Here’s a reasonable hypothesis: we can use social media to increase customer retention by 5%. Or to increase our win ratio by 3% because we’ll increase the reputation of our brand. Or we can shorten the sales cycle by 10%. Or accelerate product development. Or…

It’s very hard to measure the value of customers having heard of your as an abstract thing, but you can say “here’s where we are now, what if we could improve these metrics related to that issue by some reasonable amount?”

It’s not, of course, the perfect “Put X social media fuel into the engine and Y will come out,” but it’s a useful way to quantify expectations. In many ways social media puts marketers back into the days of old-fashioned offline brand advertising; you can measure a lot of things, but drawing causal links is very hard. But you CAN make reasonable assumptions and test them out.