Tonight, I'm throwing out a hypothesis about social media participation & social media marketing:

The majority of marketers who engage in social media do so NOT because it produces greater ROI (professionally), but because the metrics are more immediately tangible and emotionally rewarding.

Social media engagement, whether it's building a name for yourself on Twitter, growing your connections on Facebook, increasing the number of followers on Digg or ratcheting up your popularity in a niche service or forum, produces some very compelling results. Changing some title tags, tweaking internal links or writing an article on a boring, business-relevant subject may bring more direct financial ROI per hour invested, but the metrics don't FEEL as emotionally rewarding.

I'll show, rather than tell.

Let's say I put in some effort attracting more relevant visitors to my site. I see that a certain phrase is sending good quality traffic via my analytics and decide to pursue a higher ranking for that keyword. I do a bit of external link research, find some good places for a listing, maybe acquire a small handful of external links. I tweak the title tag, the H1 and a bit of the page content and make the call to action more prominent and compelling. I find a few important pages on my site (the top pages tool is bad-ass for this) and place some good internal links. My rankings rise a few positions and I see more traffic the next week.

My conversions go up, and my company makes a few hundred more dollars in signups every week thereafter. I can track my progress through analytics:

Now, to a CFO or a manager concerned with the bottom line, that's a beautiful thing. To see 59 conversions this week vs. 53 from last week means an improvement of more than 10% for an investment of only a day's work. Repeat that process and you've got something amazing on your hands.

But... To a marketer, from a selfish, emotional, human standpoint, it's not nearly as gratifying as even the most superficial social media engagement.

Let's say that instead of spending that day alone in my world of SEO and conversion optimization, I venture out into the realm of social media. I decide that I need to grow my social account's reach so that when I broadcast messages, they reach a larger audience, when I reach out to my network, I can find more influential contributors, when I paste links, more people click them. From a marketing perspective, these are all good, relevant, valuable things.

But let's be honest - the thing marketers (and humans as a whole) love about social media is the way the metrics present themselves:

My Facebook feedback loop shows me lots of new friend requests, event invitations, group invitations, status updates from my network and images where people have tagged me.

Twitter shows me what the SEO community is thinking about and how they're talking about my brand.

StumbleUpon shows statistics about what types of content are bringing visits and positive/negative reviews.

Now, I can come up with logical and entirely factual reasons why reviewing and answering all of these is important. I can legitimately justify why updating my status and adding more people to my friend list, replying to feedback and building up relationships are valuable to branding, marketing and bottom line metrics for the company. In fact, I've even got statistics to prove that our site derives value from social media:

There's Twitter at the bottom of the list, bringing 10K+ visits to our site! That's huge, right?

Here's the problem... It's also the lowest converting traffic of any referral source - less than half that of aggregate Google referrals.

I grant that direct referrals are never the whole story, and that there is real branding, marketing and user acquisition value to the traffic, participation and effort spent in social media. What I worry about is whether these intangibles are worth the expenditure.

In every one of the social media cases, the feedback and the metrics are coming from real people that I can reply to, hear back from and strike up a conversation with. The lonely days of lines & numbers as the only recompense for my marketing efforts are at an end. When I engage in social media marketing, I don't feel like an SEO geek, toiling against an algorithm and an anonymous search audience. I feel like a social butterfly, blossoming in the world of Twitter & Facebook, the same outlets the media is raving on about all day long (when not obsessed with swine flu, that is).

The trouble isn't that social media is useless. It's that a dichotomy exists between the financial & business value of certain marketing efforts and the psychological quality of the associated metrics:

We're all human, and few of us are immune from the emotional baggage that comes with that designation. It's hard to put in 8 hours of classic keyword research, content creation and link building and see results several weeks later through a series of lines and figures when applying those same 8 hours blogging, twittering could earn a couple hundred responses, 30 retweets and 18 new followers. The feedback loop is immediate, direct, personal and fulfilling. It feels good to be recognized, to be listened to, to be engaged - that's how our minds work and there's little use fighting it.

I'm just suggesting that we might want to be extra careful about distributing our time and energy in the places it can earn the best ROI. At least... most of the time :-)

p.s. This is just my personal opinion, so I'd love to hear what you think. I recognize that SMM, when it achieves dual goals of traffic & link building, is of massive value (as are other activities designed to leverage the social web to bolster high ROI tactics), but I'm more skeptical of the ROI from social networking & driving up social media popularity.