How do will we know if we have achieved success with social media?

I was recently asked the question “how will we know if we have achieved success in our social media engagement?” (i.e the age old ROI issue) by a someone from my client’s senior management team. The only problem was that it was a closing rhetorical question for which they did not actually want to hear a response at that particular moment.

There are plenty of ways to approach this one, however I usually like to keep my response simple. Rather than saying something abstract (albeit true) such as “the ROI of social media engagement is that your organization will still exist in 5 years”, I usually prefer to throw the ball back in the question issuers court: What are your objectives?

I compare it to someone asking me “how will I know if i have achieved success on the telephone”. Food for thought…