Andy McLaughlin told me today that every time someone asks the question in the headline of this post, a kitten dies. (He was quoting some tweet from the SIPA conference in June.)

Sorry, kitty.

The canonical response seems to be “That’s the wrong question,” which simply makes my head hurt.

When someone asks about the ROI of social media, what they’re really asking is “why should I do it?” And when the social media evangelist replies, “that’s the wrong question,” what they hear is, “Oh. Then I guess I shouldn’t bother.”

“That’s the wrong question” reinforces the impression that the “social media” craze is some weird trendy thing that people (a) want to do but (b) can’t justify and will (c) get over in a couple years.

Of course I realize that return on investment is, in fact, a calculation that simply does not apply to lots of things that a company should do. Even though every expenditure should have a rationale, that rationale isn’t always expressed as ROI simply because we don’t always have the numbers.

For example, if someone were to ask, “What’s the ROI of good customer service?,” you might be tempted to answer, “that’s the wrong question,” because you can’t attach clear numbers to the benefits you get from good customer service. But I think it’s the wrong answer. The correct answer would be something like, “we have no way of knowing the ROI, but we believe it’s a net benefit to the company.”

Which, of course, raises the next question: why do you think that?

And that is what is meant when people ask “what’s the ROI of social media?” They want to know “what do I get out of it, and how can I know?”

So when someone says, “What’s the ROI of social media?,” if you truly believe it’s the wrong question, please excuse the ignorance of your interlocutor, charitably replace the ignorant question with the correct question (“what do I get out of social media?”) and answer that!

There are certainly things that can be done in social media that are a ridiculous waste of time. If your CEO is spending his day interacting with people on his jogging schedule and sharing his opinions of the merits of various home health remedies, there are better things he could be doing.

How, then, do you distinguish the wasteful stuff from the beneficial stuff? Or, if I dare to put it another way, how do you distinguish the things that have no return from the things that do? How do you rationalize your investment? How do you make sure you’re not just spinning wheels? How do you know you’re doing the kinds of things that actually help your company?

Forget the calculations for a moment. Isn’t that what people mean when they say “what’s the ROI?”

So then, how do we answer that question?

First, we recognize that companies have to invest in different sorts of things. Some, like a direct-mail campaign, have a relatively clear ROI. Others, like branding campaigns, have a partially (almost sorta) measurable ROI. It’s part math and part faith. And then there are other things, like deciding on the color of your logo, which are too abstract for anyone to calculate.

Second, we have to divide “social media” into its constituent parts, because it’s not all the same. What we call “social media” is part customer service, part branding, part publishing, part community building, and maybe, if you’re lucky, part lead generation / marketing / sales.

Rather than asking about the benefit of “social media” as a whole, it might make more sense to develop a strategy that recognizes the different components and functions involved, and assign relative benefits to each.

Some of those components clearly don’t have a measurable ROI, while others might. But all of them have benefit, and that, in my opinion, is what the question is all about.