The bottom line of blogging.

They other day I was in a meeting talking to a client about the benefits of corporate blogging and other social media. A long way in to the conversation we could agree that it would have some really positive effects on the companies communication with their customers. There was one time in the conversation though were I couldn’t give my client a straight answer. The question of: how can I measure the effect of social media on the companies’ bottom line? The client works in communication and he knew that for him to ask his bosses to use money on something that can’t be directly measured on the bottom line was going to be difficult. I wish I could have referred to an analysis that showed this calculation but I couldn’t. I could talk to him for hours about how his customers might be positively affected by the companies use of social media and therefore becoming more loyal to their brand and therefore buy more products….but somehow that is not enough to convince the financial director! Therefore Im on a quest to build a convincing argument that will make me able to convince even the hardest number crunchers. So I´m hoping to get help from you guys. Does anyone have any knowledge of any research being done to find out how to measure social media, in particular blogging? I will leave you with an example of the type of argument that I was putting forward in my meeting, here made by Jeremy Wright: One of the main schools thought relative to where blogs are going is that they may eventually completely replace most typical corporate websites. Instead of having an "About Us" page that stays the same, companies will have an "About Us" category on their blog that gets updated at least once of month with new company-related information. Instead of having an "About the CEO" page, the CEO will have his or her own blog. At their core, blogs are simply websites that empower communication. Why wouldn’t a company want to empower communication across its entire website?