Proving ROI from social / earned media activity is not impossible. It does however require 3 core abilities from a brand 1. a methodical approach to measuring micro social metrics 2. an accurate measurement of Share of Voice and Sentiment (which is not possible to get from any of the "listening" tools out there - Radian 6, brandwatch etc) – you need a process like the Human Digital Active Listening Service 3. an ability to manipulate data, in order to find correlations between social metrics and financial ones