There is this big debate about if you should or should not try and determine ROI on social media efforts.  I am clearly in the former camp.

Evan LaPointe, whom I had the pleasure to interact with a bit recently is not really a social media guy.  He is a web analytics guy.  Dare I say an expert.  He was a nice article on Search Engine Land pondering the question if Web analytics is easy or difficult to do. The answer is both.

Money quote:

"But the most important—and hardest—thing to do is tie it all back to
the two very simple metrics that drive all business value: revenue and
profitability."

Yep. And I think that is why some people don't want to measure social media ROI.  It's hard. 

It's also important.  To quote someone a bit more famous than Evan, "what's measured gets managed."  If you want to improve how social media drives business value you have to measure it's impact on revenue and profitability.