One of the questions I get all the time is how to measure ROI for social media. (A better question is how do we value return on attention, but, let’s bracket that.) Naturally, you want to know if this stuff is helping you achieve your business objectives. As Hugh correctly points out, blogging’s impact is mostly indirect. And it’s also a long-haul thing. You have to stick with it to build your tribe. Some of the metrics we look at are readership, feed subscribers, comments, links, inquiries, leads, partners and so on.
That said, sometimes the gains are so immediate and direct you sort of get slapped in the face. Exhibit A: the blog for the as-yet-unreleased open source ticketing system called SimpleTicket. SimpleTicket was developed by Architel, who started blogging about it on their own site. Soon, they were getting so many inquiries for the code & questions about the project, that they needed to launch a blog just to more efficiently communicate with this growing community. So, we put together another WordPress-driven site for SimpleTicket, and they started blogging the project progress there.

Results to date:

• A new crackerjack employee for Architel, who found them (and thought they were cool) because of SimpleTicket
• Over $75,000 in annual billings from new clients who hired Architel after discovering them through SimpleTicket
• Immediate improvements to the base code for the project; questions answered
• An international group of beta testers ready for the code release on the 28th

Again, the impact of blogging & social media is often indirect, but these are some pretty good results for a blog that is just a few weeks old.

Technorati Tags: architel, hugh+macleod, simpleticket