Blogs, podcasts and Facebook—social media venues that still confound many marketers—may be more measurable than previously thought. So says Katie Delahaye Paine, the founder and CEO of KDPaine & Partners consultancy.

It depends on how marketers define ROI, she said yesterday during a panel discussion at Mesh, a two-day web and technology conference held in downtown Toronto this week.

“What’s the ‘R’ and what’s the ‘I?’” she said, explaining that the option of participating in social media without any investment should change how businesses think about the space.

“You can’t divide by zero. You’re not going to measure the return on an investment of zero. It’s more about the ‘R.’ What is the return you are expecting?”

She said most people get involved in social media not to generate sales but to foster “reputation, relationships, engagement, customer satisfaction and employee engagement.”

Joining Paine on the panel were David Jones, vice-president of digital communications at Hill & Knowlton, and Sylvain Perron, managing director of Edelman Digital Canada.

Paine fielded questions on how brands could measure the effect of their involvement in social media, or whether they should even bother trying.

When Stuart MacDonald, founder of Expedia and the panel moderator, pressed Paine on the issue and asked how to draw the line between a healthy social media program and increased sales, Paine responded that it was a matter of communication.

“When we started getting the market research people involved in our PR discussions, that’s when we could make a correlation between what was going on on the media side of things and what was going on in sales.”

“It’s ultimately the same measure you hold every other [marketing method] to,” added Jones. “Most advertising can’t be tracked to sales very easily.”

The topic of online business dominated the second day of the conference. Earlier sessions examined online ad networks, online brand-building and how large corporations are investing in social media.

During the Social Media and Enterprise panel, attendees were shocked to hear Chris Reid, national manager, product planning and research for Yamaha Motor Canada, reveal his company’s strict internal social media controls. Fellow panelists Natalie Johnson of General Motors and Jenny Bullough of Harlequin Enterprises created policies allowing employees to represent their companies in online communities, whereas Yamaha discourages the practice.

“Employees are not to represent the company in an official capacity at this point,” said Reid. “I have an exception for myself... Everything runs past my desk to make sure nobody crosses the line.”

Speaking with Marketing after the panel, Reid said the Canadian division of Yamaha was the first to use social media, beating the larger American and Japanese divisions. But the risks involved in the customer service elements of the program warranted a cautious approach.

“I want to open it up eventually,” Reid said. “But our products are high-performance products that can hurt people if they’re misused.”

To deal with issues of repair, injuries or punitive damages, Reid serves as the social media gatekeeper to keep his company on safe legal ground. “We have to be very aware of how we address service issues and it’s a thin line.”