Thanks to David Meerman Scott for his recent “epic” rant on “Freakin ROI” (courtesy of Todd Defren’s PR Squared Blog). It’s certainly music to the ears of marketing and PR professionals everywhere. Just think, wouldn’t it be nice if corporate executives could rely on their professional staff’s education, years of real world experience, and intuition and listen with an open mind to new ideas, strategies and tactics, like social media for instance. It’s an energizing wish, but in reality, they won’t and the reason is because of “Freakin ROI”, or the lack thereof at this point.

In today’s corporate culture, sales executives typically have the loudest voice in the conference room, and when quarterly sales don’t meet expectations, they are also first on the hot seat. In my experience, their first line of defense typically is to comment on the lack of sales leads. Of course, next in line is the marketing executive who now needs to justify his/her marketing tactics – and so the search for measurable marketing results begins. And when marketing budgets get cut, the first programs to be put aside are those tactics that are difficult to measure.

As David points out, many marketing tactics can and should be measured. But even with sophisticated analytics and CRM packages, tracking a contact through multiple touch points and attempting to correlate back to a sale or a sales lead, is as we know, nearly impossible in large B2B enterprises. Hence, creating a measurable ROI model for each specific marketing tactic is even more difficult.

So should we continue to attempt to generate ROI models, or is it futile and a waste of time? I believe that ROI is indeed important, while recognizing that there are many marketing and PR tactics that are clearly related to ROI, but not clearly measurable.  I guess, in the short term, it’s most important to fight the battle and continue to attempt to analyze and correlate data. In the long run, we can support the efforts of David Meerman Scott and other new media evangelists to change the entrenched corporate culture that’s reliant solely on ROI.