Collecting All Social Media Metrics

Even the companies that are most forward-thinking in their use of social media tools are looking for other examples of what people are tracking and counting in order to judge the success of their investments. There are some things that are inherently difficult about this - can we, and should we, measure the quality of a relationship and then relate that back to business benefit?  At an individual level that seems very mercenary but as businesses we have to prioritize where to spend money and time so we have to evaluate whether our efforts to build relationships make sense. 

What we are left with is the slightly stale sounding business practice of tracking metrics.  Once you have metrics you can track against your own previous performance or you can benchmark against other companies in a similar category. Metrics in the social media space are just emerging and many companies are simply using activity-based metrics (pageviews, time on site, etc.) to track 'success' but we collectively need to understand how that activity translates into business results.  In relationships the payoff sometimes takes a while to appear so we also need to think about the expectations - in time - we set to achieve ROI.

I've started a list of the common - and not so common - ways in which social media success is measured within the enterprise. What metrics do you use?

Comments

[Marcel LeBrun]

There is certainly a lot of great discussion taking place on metrics in social media. The interesting thing is that you have two very different characteristics. One the one hand, social media produces many "digital breadcrumbs" that we can track & measure (you listed many of those on your social media metrics page). On the other hand, there isn't an default measurement that is used to measure ROI (like pageviews in advertising - even though it is recognized that pagewiews are not perfect).

I think the interesting thing about this situation is that it forces the industry to tie the measurements/metrics to business objectives which is the question we should be starting with anyway.

For example, if our goal is to launch a social media outreach campaign to identify influencers, listen to their ideas, reach out to them and start to participate in the discussion about our brand or industry, then we might want to track things like on-topic influence (which may be composed of metrics like mentions, comments, on topic links, etc.), and also track engagement stage (like a sales pipeline) of each influencer. Then we can measure our progress against the business objectives. We might also want to track particular ideas or concepts that we would like to see associated with our brand and determine if we are seeing an increase of these ideas mentioned along with our brand. I think this is the way campaigns, or ongoing initiatives in social media will be measured for some time.

We built our tool at Radian6 to track these digital breadcrumbs which we call conversational dynamics and then let the marketing or PR pro use them to measure outcomes that tie back to their business objective.

[Rachel Happe]

Hi Marcel -

Great additions. With the addition of many search and discovery technologies there are some very interest conversation tracking tools emerging. I'm looking for more evolution in this market in '08.