Guest post by Eric Melin, Manager Marketing & Communications at Spiral16.

There are plenty of CEOs who are still skeptical about the ultimate value of social media.

A new report says that a shocking 43% of B2B companies admit that their CEOs “never consider” their social media reputation. 74% of CEOs think that marketers focus too much on the “latest marketing trends such as social media,” and say they can rarely demonstrate its business value, according to Fournaise Marketing Group.

I get where the CEOs are coming from. If my marketing department told me that the company’s social media profiles were consistently gaining new likes and follows, I would say “So what? What are you doing with them?”

Closing the Gap Between Social and ROI

Companies need to be able to prove that their social media efforts are paying off in a business sense. They need to be able to go beyond surface-value metrics and correlate their social media and web presence with tangible business metrics. The problem is that ROI is a financial metric and social media metrics are decidedly non-financial.

So what approach do you take?  READ MORE