Nice coverage. Social media is much like other marketing endeavors with regards to measurement. That is many companies do not know how to appropriately measure and/or ignore this important step. Measurement is imperative – you want to maximize your efforts so you have to know what results you are producing. Also, it is required for budget justification – at least where I have worked over the years.

The one thing I always recommend is NOT to tie social media (or marketing) measurement to sales. This always leads to endless debate. The fact is that “Sales” sells and marketing creates awareness and generates qualified leads. Lets not mix these two up.

So what should be measured? I make some recommendations in an article I authored, “Measuring the Value of Social Media” at http://bit.ly/hodQp. I hope you find this useful.

Best,
Social Steve

PS Given the name of your blog, I thought you might find this interesting as well – “Social Media Conversion and the Social Media Marketing Funnel” at http://bit.ly/dsPrq.

The fearless marketing players in these turbulent times acknowledge that marketing is about *business* and that determining the benefit of what we do needs to be an objective – even if the tools are rough at the moment. I am sure your clients value that in what you bring, Gifford.

At the same time, maybe this isn’t surprising. One of my bugbears at the moment is people who always insist that the ‘R’ in ROI is financial. I work in B2B marketing, and when we work with Social Media, we’re generally dealing with the top of the funnel, raising awareness of our clients’ brands and products, and encouraging people to engage with them.

It’s often impossible to measure performance in terms of leads, sales or anything financial in the short term, and we therefore only set targets in terms of what we are able to measure. For that reason, the ROI we measure differs from client to client, although it will pretty much come from the list you mention above: traffic, engagement, branding (in terms of mentions), and occasionally leads.

Still, you’d be mad not to measure at all – my clients certainly wouldn’t let me get away with that!

I like your approach of taking one social media at a time (the one companies spend most time on?) and getting a good handle on it first. For sure social measurement is going to be the next killer app – but it will have to start with an agreement of what you *need* to measure, which in turn is predicated on what are the key drivers of company success (traffic? engagement? leads? etc).

(Re the spelling of my name, not to worry, I have been called worse

Measuring the impact of social media is appearing as one of the biggest challenges to modern company operations. Just looking at the prevalence of blog posts dicussing it’s importance and the need for it sets the stage.

I don’t think anyone (that I’ve read about) has really nailed a solid methodology for simple measurement of social media.

Taking one at a time even, if it were possible to track Twitter metrics over time in a graphical way (a la Google Analytics) would be huge.

This would need to incorporate tracking bugs to facilitate the connection between social media platforms and your end conversion goals.

Harder still are he brand oriented metrics.

I see the Karma tab on the Feedly service and I see some soft improvements and hope that we’re getting there, but social measurement is surely the next KILLER APP.

Oli