(Packed House at SMB10 by Bob Collins on Flickr)

The theme of Social Media Breakfast Boston 10 was “ Getting ROI Out of Social Media.”
HubSpot’s CEO Brian Halligan discussed their method for measuring how social media conversations translate into sales.
Marketers at the event suggested that hiring good content people is a more attractive alternative than buying advertising.
Matt Cutler, Vice President, Marketing & Analytics at Visible Measures, presented on the ROI of viral video.
Visible Measures has powerful tools for measuring viral impact, a database of millions of videos and criteria to evaluate what makes videos “go viral.”
Matt drew a comparison to how much Nike would have had to spend on TV commercials to create the same impact that one of their viral videos had (with 16M views).

He calculated that broadcast TV CPMs are apx. $25 and online video CPMs are apx. $50-75, and he created an estimate.
His formula needs to add one critical consideration: context.
Watching a viral video forwarded to me by a friend, posted in a favorite blog or on a social network is worth much more than a tv spot that interrupts my show.