12 Jun More on social media measurement
I’m so glad Ginger commented on my last post because I really need to clarify – it IS important to know which components of social media are working. At the same time if you over analyze your traffic you might end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater and stop doing something that has longer term results – like working with bloggers.
I am hardly an expert in this area but there are some really great blogs and sites where you can learn the best ways to review your own social media efforts. Here are a few of my faves:
Katie Paine is one of the top gurus in measuring ROI for marketing efforts – I’ve been reading her brilliant posts and newsletters for years. She’s got some ongoing discussions regarding measuring social media that are really insightful.
Of course everyone should check in with Mashable to find out what’s buzzing in social media but I found an excellent post on that site that talks about using quantitative AND qualitative measurements for social media. I believe people in marketing have been so trained to measure things qualitatively they often miss the quantitative success. Develop your goals using both – but in social media I think you need to look at whether you’re meeting your end goals. Don’t fixate on the results of each specific tweet or post.
Small businesses should really pay attention to Duct Tape Marketing for great tips and analysis of marketing tactics. I found several excellent posts on monitoring and measuring social media results if you’re a small business. (Make sure you check out their podcasts too)
Those are just three folks I’ve found to be helpful, of course there are many more out there. I’d love readers to comment where they find the best info on measuring social media but mainly, I want to say this…
Marketing and PR 2.0 are all about integrating messaging channels like social media, traditional print or TV, direct mail and the like. For that reason there’s a huge piece of it that we still aren’t sure how to measure – that’s the SYNERGY between the channels we’re using. We don’t have a tool to measure the impact of that powerful area where our mediums overlap – it’s that bermuda triangle of marketing that results in what my smart friend Andrew Rosenthal at happier.com likes to call “organic growth”.
So make sure you’re measuring your efforts with quantitative goals, not just applying detailed analysis to each medium. Otherwise you might start killing parts of your campaign that are supporting the end results in ways you just can’t decipher.