From Gartner. Interesting notations regarding ROI, and the difficulty associated with measuring ROI as it relates to corporate objectives. Topline summary...
The top reasons for investing in social media are the following:
1. Strengthen Relationship with Customer
2. Enhance Brand Awareness or Brand Preference
3. Share Information and Ideas With Customers, Suppliers and Partners
4. Establish Interactive Relationship With Customers
5. Increase My Organization’s Revenue Through New Products, Customers
The top leading concern or challenge across every industry was an unclear business case or clear ROI. Several consumer-facing industries that were early adopters, such as media, retail, and areas in high technology, are now re-examining and questioning their business strategy around social.
ROI, measurable business value and budget justification for social projects have quickly become unavoidable topics for companies. Social metrics, such as the number of fans, likes, number of weekly tweets, and even areas such as sentiment analysis are not enough to correlate with the contribution of top business objectives, such as churn rate, new qualified leads or revenue increases. The implication of this lack of measurable benefits is that there will be a rapid maturing of the discipline of deploying social applications during the next two years. Users that can prove measurable benefits best are likely to get the next round of funding and maintain momentum in their social software projects after the hype has died.
I don't think there are any surprises here, especially the last graph where 70% cannot quantity the ROI. Akin to quantifying the ROI of a seat belt in an auto: it's a necessary component to the vehicle.