The Struggle to Measure Social Media Effectiveness

Social media is at its core a communications and discovery solution.  Both of those things, communications and discovery, are very hard to measure and more often than not measurements tend to be negative.  For example, Sue Feldman my colleague at IDC, did some very popular research a few years ago called "The High Cost of Not Finding Information".  The values we need to measure to understand what social media provides are the following:

- What is the value of having a better conversation?
- What is the value of meeting someone?
- What is the value of getting more accurate information faster?
- What is the value of being able to drive consensus around an idea faster?
- What is the value of building trust?
- What is the opportunity cost of not innovating?

All thorny things to measure but all at the heart of being a successful business and about as hard to measure as extrapolating the value of a baby by measuring its head. Chuck Hollis wrote an excellent post on the state of social media efforts at EMC and mulls over some of the measurement challenges there. The things he can measure easily (activity) are not the things that provide insight into the real value to the organization.

Laura Fitton (aka @Pistachio) got me thinking with her post about giving Twitter homework to students.  I can pretty effectively - at an individual level - measure how many new people I've met, how many conversations I've had, how many people I've now met in person, and how many collaborative efforts have come out of my engagement there - and how all of those things have changed over time.  Abstracting that to a whole community becomes challenging because it is hard to track what conversations were work-related (it may not matter), how many people have collaborated based on a conversation, and how many business initiatives got started that would not have otherwise.  But, you can start by asking your members some of these things and it might be instructive.  I've added some of these metrics to my blog page that lists social media metrics.

How would you approach this issue?  What do you measure?

Comments

[Beth Kanter]

Thank you for this excellent post. Last month I did a panel at the nonprofit tech conference called Social Media ROI Case Study Slam - I have the presentations up here on the social media metrics wiki
http://socialmediametrics.wikispaces.com

I'm going to add a link to your post and page there as well .. excellent.

[Donnie Peterson]

All to often, the wonderful "newness" of technology invites us to match the innovation with equally innovative ways interpreting, discussing, training and distributing it. In fact, if we search our hearts, minds and souls, we will find that the Social Media phenomenon is really not as new as we think--its merely an acceleration and delineation of communication options. With that in mind, measuring Social Media impacts ought to focus primarily on mission delivery of the org/biz and successful delivery of service to their consumers. That is the only way to avoid the concerns executive directors and board's might have when considering whether to invest time and energy toward Social Media applications. Simply put, measure the improved service delivery as it relates to ANYTHING and that should be the focus. Technologies will change, but the need to communicate our mission service and success shall remain a challenge in this and future tech paradigms.