As the old saying goes, “If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.” That adage was never truer than today, when many companies find themselves implementing social media into their organizations. You know there's potential, you know other organizations are reaping benefits, but you suspect that there is certainly a “wrong” way to go about it. So how do you measure or monitor social customer relationship management (CRM) solutions?

For starters, as with most projects, you need to define your terms and your concepts and understand what your goals are: both your traditional business goals and your social media business goals. Next you need to understand how social media is likely to affect your traditional business. Next, you need to understand what your costs are with social media, and this is extra tricky. Finally, you need to understand what benefits you are chasing and determine how to attach monetary values to these benefits.

Since there is little in the way of standard ROI or metrics to measure the effectiveness of such solutions, many companies are having to try and make it up as they go along. There is a method to the madness, as many attendees of a TMC (News - Alert) webinar entitled, “The ROI of Social Media Monitoring and Engagement” discovered. The webinar discussed these issues in depth, providing tips, lists and formulas for assigning monetary values to the kind of social media processes that are going in in nearly every call center today (whether they're measured or not).

The webinar, which was held on February 23 but is available as a recording, was hosted by Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, professor and director of the UCLA Executive Education Program for Social Media, and James Norwood, vice president of Product Marketing for customer experience solutions provider Kana. You can find the event archived here.