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One of the biggest bugaboos for many communications plans is measurement. How will we know if our communications efforts really worked? How can we prove to the board that the investment was worth it?

With Web 2.0, there’s a similar concern—especially for organizations considering a major investment in IT infrastructure to support a social media initiative.

In this month’s social media supplement, David Gammel takes a look at ways that associations can measure the return on a Web 2.0 investment. As he admits in the article, measurement for regular websites is still being refined; measurement for social media initiatives is at an even earlier stage of development. But there are ways to look at what you’re doing with Web 2.0 and decide if those efforts are helping to achieve your goals. David has some good advice to share.

As part of his research for the article, David interviewed Jeremiah Owyang, a social media analyst with Forrester Research with a lot of ideas about measuring engagement, subjective vs. objective measures, and more. Of course, the article David wrote couldn’t include everything Jeremiah had to say, so for those of you who would like to hear more of Jeremiah’s thoughts, an audiotaped version of the interview is available for your listening pleasure.

What is your association doing to measure its Web 2.0 efforts? What metrics should associations be using? What aren’t we measuring that we should?