Your point about looking for digital fingerprints is the angle that we’ve been promoting – this is really looking to try and determine (or measure) the richness of a companies engagement with a customer or prospect via social media and how this impacts sales, customer retention, and cross-sell ratios. Are buyers connecting to the enterprise via blogs, communities, Twitter etc – this would give me a better and richer insight into how effective the organisation is in terms of connecting to buyers in different ways.

If I can’t see prospects interacting with us outside of the traditional sales channel then I’d be very worried. For example, can I see evidence that a prospective buyer has been asking our R&D people questions via communities or Twitter or Facebook?

To me, the better ROI will come from understanding the types of interaction and engagement so that the efforts of the whole enterprise can be aligned to where we know buyers are congregating – i.e. they are not lined up outside our front door…