Tia Fisher has worked in on and offl ine marketing for over ten years, and in 1997 joined the New Business Development Team at eModeration ( www.emoderation.com ), a leading international moderation and social media management company that lists many Fortune 500 companies among its clients. ABSTRACT Return on Investment (ROI) has become the Holy Grail of social media. Marketers are being squeezed between admonishments to participate in the vast new online communications available to them and

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... ands to justify the cost using conventional advertising metrics. New ' ROI calculators ' are being created almost as fast as new social networking sites -then just as quickly being dismissed as being unworkable. In this article, Tia Fisher of eModeration takes a long view of the current state of ROI in social media, and examines the arguments for and against attempting to use any kind of metric to justify involvement in a social media program.