This Tuesday, the Chinwag Live went 'on tour' to the E-commerce Expo at Olympia. In a packed session - sorry to those who didn't make it in - the debate ranged from metrics to the human side of social media. Philip Buxton chaired the panel and wrote up his thoughts on what transpired.

Chairing Chinwag Live’s Social Media ROI panel debate at E-commerce Expo last week was fascinating for a number of reasons – not least for the amount of people trying to pack themselves into a small space.

The debate featured some social media luminaries: Robin Grant from We Are Social; Stuart Bruce from Wolfstar; Helen Lawrence, social media planner at Dare; and Alex Burmaster at Nielsen Online. But the driver of the conversation (the influencer if you will) turned out to be Ankur Shah, founder of Techlightenment, who, as Robin described, was coming at things from a direct response-focused angle.

The great thing about Ankur’s input was that it dragged conversation about social media out of (again, as Robin put it) ‘fluffy’ objectives and into its value in terms of hard, lead-generation targets.

While we all see that connecting with customers ‘at their place’ – their social online networks – is a great thing to be doing, measuring the value of these kinds of things is nigh on impossible. iCrossing as it happens is doing the best job I’ve seen of seeking to ‘measure ‘engagement’ and thus place a benchmark on the ‘success’ that investment in social media is having. But, as we enter recession, there’s no doubt there’s a new sense of urgency about how we can get social media to deliver on lead-gen objectives.