The Social Organization: Social Media Metrics

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Interesting blog post - and very timely, I work on a new start-up social app (2collab) but as an extension of a large multinational publishing house (Elsevier) the need to measure our success and contribution is paramount and a process we're going through now.
But metrics are only a form of measurement - you still need to be clear on your goals and objectives, and then decide on a select few metrics that best support these (you shouldn't try to measure everything - this is senseless). A clear business strategy with clear USP, positioning, goals and milestones is still core, as are all the other business priorities that often get forgotten - An example being Hans' post and link to a whitepaper, which didn't download due an on-site error - yet no where on his site could I find a contact address to inform them of this broken feature. The key thing is remember that when you're measuring the effectiveness of an approach - don't place too much emphasis on a novel trend so that you end up misplacing the other essentials of business best practice (customer care, user focussed design, etc).

Brant Emery
development manager, 2collab

Posted by: Brant Emery | June 16, 2008 at 08:31 AM

Hi Rachel,
Thanks for this. It really puts a lot of my thoughts into perspective. Saved me a lot of thinking really :)

We build social applications (www.mobicules.com), and I am going to use this in our brain-storming sessions with a lot of our clients, who are all concerned with "quantifiability".

-Niraj
Co-Founder, www.mobicules.com

Posted by: Niraj Ranjan Rout | July 18, 2008 at 03:30 AM

Hi Rachel
This is very interesting. I am doing some work in this space and a lot of thinking. Here are a couple of links from my blog http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2008/07/cost_per_relate.html and
http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2008/07/calculating_the.html

I am travelling but will come back to this blog and any comments on my blogs also welcome. Many thanks and lets keep in touch kind rgds Ajit

Posted by: Ajit Jaokar | July 28, 2008 at 01:40 PM

That was a nice blog..
great job...
nice info
Busby SEO Challenge

Posted by: Busby SEO Challenge | August 16, 2008 at 06:33 AM

good

Posted by: Articles Trader | September 27, 2008 at 12:38 AM

Hey Rachel,

Is this a metric for social media or just an outline on factors we need to measure to develop a metric?

ALSO - all though all of us understand how daunting of a task it is to measure the "intangibles" to social media, I believe that fundamentally we can identify the economics to Web 2.0. (There's a whole conference on the west coast dedicated to the economics of social media. Econsm.com) Overall if we cannot come up with a good rubric then the analytics should be WORTHLESS and social media is just an outlet of interaction and engagement - Web 2.0 with no tangible and viable information regarding social interaction from a consumer psychological standpoint. As analysts and consultants we would be little more than social studies students. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there HAS TO BE a viable way to measure the analytics and information on a psychological and economic level. Like why is 70% of the most active individuals on social media platforms single - what demographic constitutes high end consumers - why are all the women hot and all the men have pot bellies (excluding me. LMAO NO I SWEAR THE PICTURES ARE REALLY ME!!! JOKE GET IT?) There has to be a correlation between user CONTENT and user ENGAGEMENT - hits per page correlating to most linked - time spent on page relating to the amount of comments/feedback SIMPLE stuff...

Posted by: Nelson A. Yuen | October 20, 2008 at 10:48 AM

Interesting list.

At a social network it is a mix of database and webanalytics stats.

The main ones are:
- New members per day/country/campaign
- Percentage profile complete
- No of logins and most recent login
- No of friends invited
- % of accepted friend invitations
- No of internal friend requests (also look out for spammers here)
- % of accepted internal friend requests
- No of posts
- No of groups joined
- No of groups created
- No of flagged posts or spam complaints
- CRM email open and click through rates
- Webanalytic stats - time of day, geography, browser used, referring site, referring keyword, entry page and exit page

Posted by: Peter Cunningham | February 22, 2009 at 06:18 AM

Thanks for all the additional contributions to this list - in particular I like your additions Paul.

I would also add that it is useful to track the percentage of:
- Passive activity (pageviews)
- Reactive activity (non-authenticated rating, re-posting, etc.)
- Contributory activity (account sign-up, commenting, tagging, inviting friends)
- Proactive content creation (original UGC posting, group creation, content moderation)

Moving people up the activity curve is important if you want to build community - depending on where you are in your deployment/maturity the ratio between different activities should be different.

Posted by: Rachel Happe | February 22, 2009 at 09:20 AM