The phrase "return on investment" was designed decades ago to decide whether to build factories, notes author David Meerman Scott in a clip from SocialMediaB2B.com, arguing that the frenzy to calculate ROI for social media is misguided.

"What we're talking about now in social media is just communications," he said. "I ask companies, 'What's the ROI of the Blackberrys in your companies? What's the ROI of the telephone? What's the ROI of communications? ...No one should be calculating the ROI of every single one of those things because it's just the way people are communicating."