Bill Sledzik, associate professor at the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at Kent State University, writes a guest post at PR Conversations about social media measurement and ROI.

He doesn't pretend to have all of the answers, but he does a good job of raising and putting into perspective the all-important question: "How effectively does our work generate leads, drive sales, reduce costs? All are bottom-line outcomes, and often difficult to tie back to PR activityâ€"online or off."

There's a good discussion over on Bill's post, so check it out. I'm using it as a launch pad for this post.

Bill poses the challenge of measuring relationships, as opposed to simply measuring outcomes such as "blog mentions" or "press clips" if you're nasty. The first step toward successful measurement (perhaps obviously) would be to measure toward your objectives. This is especially true for something as complicated and important as relationship measurement.

Don't simply "measure the relationship" to come up with something like a Relationship Value Index, for example, that is supposed to show how important a particular person or group is to your organization. Instead, if you're (at the time) concerned with crisis management, it makes sense to judge the people or publics with whom you've developed relationships on, say, their ability to pacify a riotous blogosphere. That would include factors like favorability toward your organization, credibility, reach (quality and quantity), ability to generate other posts in response (influence), frequency of activity beyond the post (conversing in comments), etc.

In a different context â€" such as a product launch â€" you could judge those same relationships with more emphasis on reach and influence but perhaps less on credibility and conversation.

This brings to back to the headline: Let's start somewhere. With all this talk of social media tools, tips and tricks, measurement often draws the short straw. It's easy to get caught up in the complexity of properly, intelligently implementing strategies that put the power of social media to good use. To make measurement possible, we need to begin these strategies with tangible metrics and objectives in mind, another element of many social media efforts that is often lacking.

Anecdotal, case-study measurement is a good start, but it rarely is based in the mindset of comparing results to objectives stated at the outset. It's one thing to be able to say you've earned your keep, but it's a whole new world to try to measure, analyze, repeat and improve.

What do we want to accomplish with our "social media efforts"? Why are we social-media-fying our news releases? Why am I helping clients podcast their thoughts and insights? What could I ever stand to gain from Facebook? Can I possibly find a meaningful way to measure relationships and connect them to business objectives?

Or can we just keep blogging because it's cool?

(For the record, there are plenty of folks far smarter than me on the subject of PR measurement. Katie Paine is one. Part of the reason I'm writing is to "think out loud," as they say. Also, Geoff Livingston has a good collection of social media case studies; some certainly fall into the anecdotal style of "measurement," but some are more, well, sophisticated, I guess.)

"Measurement" courtesy of thespacesuitcatalyst via Flickr