• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, August 9, 2013

Determining return on investment and measurement are still the top issues facing marketers, according to a new report from Forrester titled “Integrate Social Into Your Marketing RaDaR.” Forrester analyst Nate Elliott was blunt summarizing the problem: “The sobering reality is that nearly a decade into the era of social media, more social marketers are failing than succeeding.”

Ouch -- but sometimes the truth hurts. In Forrester’s survey, 38% of marketers surveyed identified ROI as one of the top three challenges they face, followed by measurement issues, identified by 35% of respondents.  Next up, 34% of respondents said lack of internal resources was one of their three biggest issues, followed by lack of budget (25%), “integrating this channel with other channels (24%), and lack of time (23%).

According to Elliott, the failure to integrate social media with other channels is due to an attitude he calls “Social Exceptionalism,” which treats social media as fundamentally different from other types of media and marketing: “Rather than recognizing that social is just another marketing channel, many marketers see it as unique.”

Of course ROI and measurement have been chronic issues for social media marketing. Last year I wrote about a survey of 329 brand marketing executives by PulsePoint and the Economist Intelligence Unit, in which half of the survey respondents said lack of standardized metrics for ROI was a big impediment for social media campaigns.

Also last year, I wrote about “Marketing ROI in the Era of Big Data,” a study presented by Columbia University Business School professors and the New York American Marketing Association, which found that most advertisers and marketers are failing to exploit “Big Data,” including the wealth of information about consumer habits and preferences flowing from social media. This survey of 283 corporate marketing decision makers, conducted by Research Now, found 39% said their own company’s data is collected too infrequently or not real-time enough.

Meanwhile 51% said that a lack of sharing customer data within their own organization is a barrier to effectively measuring their marketing ROI. 37% of respondents did not include any mention of financial outcomes when asked to define what “marketing ROI” meant for their own organization, with 22% using brand awareness as their sole measure when evaluating their marketing spending.