I know, I know, yesterday I just posted about a study that was documenting how social media was working for small businesses. So why today am I saying “it’s not always about the numbers?”

Over at Jay Baer’s excellent Convince and Convert blog there’s a guest post by Matt Ridings. Ridings is talking about bigger-than-small-business clients of course, so he’s talking about the fixation on “ROI” — which means Return On Investment.

Bigger companies like to quantify their investment in social media and attach a dollar volume to new business they get through it. Which is totally doable. But Ridings says don’t get fixated on the ROI. It is just the nature of social media that quantifying its effect on a business is difficult.

I’ll give a perfect example. For one of my clients, I pushed hard on Twitter a special offer for a day or two. So I called him up to see if he had any takers. The answer — yes. But they all came over the phone, and he never asked them how they found out about the offer. It originated on his blog, of course, but who knows if someone found that offer via Twitter? He didn’t ask. Which is OK — it’s not his job to spend time on that. His job is sales.

Was there data to show high interest in his offer on Twitter? You bet. But who knows even if he’d asked the people who called if they found the offer on Twitter if they could correctly answer the question.

Ridings makes a great point too: that focusing on “ROI” is often just an excuse — to continue to “hide” from the public and customers. I think that’s about right. But it shadows a point I made yesterday: so many small businesses are now using social media that NOT using it is putting your business further behind the competition. I suspect a lot of the late adopters are fearful — and hiding from public view because of fears over being open and accessible.

Fair enough. Just don’t kid yourself that your business will look any better as more of your competitors get on the bandwagon.