If your company or brand is considering a social media strategy, you’re probably asking a lot of questions about how to measure your ROI.

While David Meerman Scott thinks it’s a fool’s errand, one new service is attempting to make it possible to measure your social media ROI. Is what was once thought Grail now cherished treasure?

Making valuable social media metrics a reality?

ViralHeat has work to do. Social Media Monitoring Leader Radian6 is partnering to broaden its reach and Web Analytics Giant Omniture is moving into the monitoring field.

Committing to a comprehensive and effective social media strategy is indeed cumbersome. It can consume valuable resources, human and electronic. And reporting back on the engagement can be just as time consuming as creating the content. Viralheat’s goal is to make monitoring and quantifying your social media interactions quick and easy, accomplished in one simple interface.

From the site:

Viralheat is a social measurement platform designed with simplicity and ease in mind. Built from the ground up to be timely and efficient, Viralheat allows users to easily comprehend social media.

Viralheat aims to be a one stop shop for understanding social media. Today, Viralheat covers hundreds of viral video destination sites, Twitter, and millions [of] blogs & websites.

The problem is …

… There’s not much I can accomplish with Viralheat that I can’t accomplish with Google Trends or a Twitter search. And those are free, while Viralheat charges even for a basic account.

Using Viralheat, I can’t track the traffic generated from mentions on blogs or social media sites, nor leads or conversions. It’s a whole lot of sizzle (the promise of valuable social media metrics), but I haven’t found the steak yet (the actual value).

A more valuable solution would be to somehow tie together a website’s existing metrics platform with a Viralheat-created tag that would measure traffic from emerging social media sites. Or tailor the tag to include metrics only from channels in which the brand is engaging.

Expand the functionality to get to Adoption

Viralheat could refine the functionality to better track social media engagements that result in inbound traffic or in increased leads or sales. The resulting metrics would exponentially improve a company’s understanding of the kinds of content that work in the social media space. They could also reveal the overall value of the channel being engaged in and whether or not there is an ROI.

Right now though, Viralheat is in the very early stages of the Experimentation Phase of the New Media Life Cycle. They will need to continue expanding their functionality and learning about the needs of their users if they are going to attract a broad user base.

Fortunately, Viralheat is demonstrating a willingness to listen to their users and refine the channel. In testing the site, I set up an account and added a search query to track. Ten minutes later I got an email from Vishal Sankhla, founder of Viralheat, informing me that my query was malformed. He pointed me to an FAQ on how to correctly form a search string for the site.

The takeaway

It seems like everyone wants to measure their social media ROI, but there’s no consensus way to do it. Right now, simple traffic measurement isn’t enough to determine the value or quality of engagement. In a social space, the right returns won’t necessarily be quantifiable. It will take thorough qualitative analysis. Direct traffic isn’t as strong an indicator of value as conversation and engagement.

My questions to you

How are you measuring your social media engagement? Have you set benchmarks?