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Social Media Principle 10 – Measure and Evaluate

Guest post by: jon leuty

Article Overview: While we intuitively know that being social is a good thing we must not forget that we work in a commercial context. Very rarely do clients give you a free hand (and a budget) to do social strategies just for the sake of it - they want to see results.

Social Media Principle 10 – Measure and Evaluate

Make the most of your analytics - you should listen, monitor and improve your social strategy on an ongoing basis. While we intuitively know that being social is a good thing we must not forget that we work in a commercial context. Very rarely do clients give you a free hand (and a budget) to do social strategies just for the sake of it - they want to see results. Problem is, measuring Œsocial¹ is a huge challenge and to date there are more open questions that agreeable methods.

Like PR and other brand-building efforts, social media is one of those valuable things whose impact we can't agree on how to measure, but the debate on how to do it best does not negate it¹s value.... Remember what Albert Einstein once said: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

But hey, do not despair! The trick is to first figure out what our goals and objectives are for each type of activity and then to assign the right attributes to measure against. We¹ve developed an interesting combination of areas and metrics that can potentially tell a good story on the effectiveness of our social activities and might give a good indication on ROI (although attaching VALUES to these metrics and benchmarking are still very problematic).

Apart from measuring and evaluating your different activities, in most cases the conversation take place with or without you. Whether from a purely market research perspective, support for PR, campaign tracking, product launch, crisis management or for the purpose of a more advanced digital and social media strategy, you cannot ignore these conversations - the least you can do is listen..

Listening and monitoring will help you discover which conversations are having the most impact on your brand, unlock critical insights and develop actionable recommendations There are now countless ways (for paid-for and free) to listen the conversation. We must make tracking, monitoring, analysis and measurement an integral part of our work.

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Article Tags: Brand, Monitoring, Social Media, Tracking
Referred by: http://carboncopypro.com/



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Re: Kevin needs "social glue" ideas - [quote="WebBizIdeas.com":gvtxsu7g]Hi, I like the idea of "10 items that could act as "social glue" because I am an internet marketer. But I agree with the rest that the 10 recent post is nice. Maybe we should open up a new section in the forums on Social Media...or Social Media Marketing. I will tell you that the world is about 1 1/2 behind when it comes to understanding social media. Building a section now will put EvanCarmichael.com is a great position a year down the road when people realize Social Media can produce more traffic than SEO. Jeff[/quote:gvtxsu7g] Hi Jeff, Thanks for the suggestion. Why don't you start a new post (with a poll) to see if there's enough interest in your idea for a social media section?
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