• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, June 14, 2011

The social media world is dealing with return-on-investment like the shambling, many-headed hydra that it is -- meaning, slowly and in piecemeal fashion. After several years of deafening silence, 2011 has seen some promising starts, with tentative attempts to demonstrate and quantify connections between social media exposure, brand perception, and sales lift.

The most recent ROI offering comes from Ogilvy and ChatThreads, which conducted a "Integrated Social Media Sales Impact" study from January-May of this year, tracking brand exposure for 404 individuals through ChatThreads' BrandEncounter platform. Ogilvy and ChatThreads looked at purchases by quick service restaurant customers patronizing KFC, McDonalds, Subway, Taco Bell and Wendy's; the customers were sorted by their degree of exposure to social media advertising for the QSR brand in question, as well as their exposure to advertising delivered through other channels.

The data are interesting, to say the least, because consumers who were exposed exclusively to social media showed greater purchase proclivity than consumers who were exposed to social media in tandem with other advertising platforms. For example, consumers who were exposed exclusively to social media ads for KFC were seven times more likely to spend more than the average consumer. Meanwhile for the QSR category in aggregate, consumers exposed to social media plus billboard ads were twice as likely to spend more than the average consumer; the same result was observed (for Wendy's) with social media plus TV ads.

Quite what all this means isn't clear, especially in light of the remarkable disparity between social media alone versus social media in combination with other media; for one thing, the preliminary study results (this was a preview) don't address the thorny issue of cause and effect. For example, are people who are exposed to social media brand advertising alone more likely to spend more than the average consumer because of the influence of social media -- or is it just that they are already loyal QSR customers, whose exposure to social media results from their pre-existing brand loyalty?

While these are important questions, I don't want to sound too critical. As noted, social media ROI is in its infancy, and I think the industry should be receptive and welcoming to preliminary results and tentative findings, which serve as a starting point for discussion and debate, even if they are (inevitably) incomplete.