It is interesting that companies, governments, and universities haven’t really learned what Amber is trying to illustrate in this post – there is no one single factor that you can point at that shows why someone does anything. Humans are complex creatures, and while we can gather data, show trends, and make educated guesses, in the end, that’s what they are – guesses.

Any executive who is asking for hard ROI numbers on social media is, quite frankly, asking the wrong question. A better question to ask is, ‘what happens if we *don’t* attempt to engage with our constituents?’ I do think that there is a dearth of measurements of the ‘negative path’ question – what happens if we choose to ignore a trend that clearly shows promise based on past successes.