Justin Ramers, director of social media, The Active Network

The still-lagging economy, corporate budget-shifting, and increasingly slick technology have all contributed to a rise in hybrid events—face-to-face meetings that include components for remote participants. While it’s easy enough to live-stream educational sessions to remote attendees, creating a virtual version of the “hallway conversation” is proving harder to pull off. But it can be done, and social media can help, says Justin Ramers, director of social media for The Active Network.

One of the biggest sticking points with using social media, however, is that it can be difficult to track the results of your efforts. How do you know those tools have done what you hoped they would do? How do you prove return on investment, or ROI, on something as ephemeral as Twitter retweets? Ramers has four ideas:

1. Develop a culture of analytics. This means getting organizational buy-in on the importance of gathering, measuring, and analyzing data. It also means being open to finding new ways to think about the data you collect, and being able to use what you learn from the number crunching to make business decisions.

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