Special Guest Blog  from Social Strategy1 Co-Founder, Dennis Stoutenburgh.

Over the past year, one of the biggest questions regarding social media marketing and engagement revolves around how to measure the return on your invested social media dollars.  This is a fair question as anyone who lived in the late 90’s remembers, the metrics around clicks and eyeball views, and savvy marketers and business leaders do not want to fall into the trap of investing based on fuzzy metrics.

While I am firm believer that not all social media activities need to have a direct dollar return, such as reputation management or market and competitive intelligence and research, you simply can’t argue that such activities and intelligence are not valuable to your organization.

Monitoring your competitors in social media provides you with more than just insights into your competitor’s products and markets; you will also find real time prospects for your company’s products.  As Social Strategy 1’s analysts have shown our clients, by monitoring competitive posts/mentions across the social media and total media ecosystem, we’re generating real-time leads that can be measured and reported.   Real-time leads of customers who are dissatisfied with your competitor’s products or service become real-time sales of your products, and that is return we can all understand!

Here’s a great example of lead gen through social media on the American Express Open Forum.