The Questions: Should social media be measured by business?

Daniela Barbosa (Factiva integration sales), Saurabh Goorha (Insight product manager) and I met for dinner with Jeremiah Owyang and John Aguilar of PodTech last night. The intent was to prepare for the Factiva Social Media Roundtable which is taking place in a few hours in Palo Alto.

(Jeremiah is just settling in at his new job at PodTech and you can tell he's jazzed because he can now focus all of his efforts on social media -- clearly where his heart is. )

Here are some of the questions we are going to be asking our slate of 23 social media thought leaders:

• Do you believe social media is important to the business community? If so should it be measured?
• Who is creating Social Media? What are they creating? And is the who more important then the what?
• If you are producing Social Media as part of your PR/Marketing plan, how will you measure ROI?
• Do you think that Social Media needs a structured, mutually agreed upon measurement techniques and metrics (e.g. MSM's ad value equivalence and article impressions) to make monitoring a more serious practice?
• So what should be measured, and how do you want it delivered?