At the SMCSLC meeting earlier this month, one attendee asked a great question. Paraphrased roughly, she inquired, how does one go about convincing business decision makers that social media is worth the time and effort?

Now especially, BDMs (as the media nerds upstairs call ‘em) are more worried about ROI than ever before. But that’s not really the point with social media, is it? It’s less about investing in your customers and prospects financially, so much as investing in them emotionally. We’ve all heard the phrase, “it’s about creating a two-way dialogue.” At this point, it’s cliche. But it remains true. The best businesses and non-profits in this experiment aren’t marketing at their friends/followers/customers, but conversing with them.

Sarah Evans has an excellent post on Mashable today that deals with this very idea. While it’s a good read overall, the best part of the piece by far is pasted below:

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Return on engagement

It’s all about ROE - return on engagement. Is your social media personality working? You’ll know when opportunities arise that never would have been possible otherwise. A few ways to “quantify” engagement:

• Track incoming traffic from links

• Number of people subscribed to RSS feeds

• Number of people in social media groups, fan pages, etc

• Trackbacks or linkbacks to posts

• Conversation tracking tools like Twitter Search

• Comments on blog posts

• Increased sales and general inquiries

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Check out the article in its entirety here.