Social media - Great channel, but what do you measure?

I'm speaking on a webinar with David Meerman Scott today.  David is author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, a fantastic book on how to use new media to better engage with your customers.

For my piece, I'm going to be discussing tracking and measurement -- the numbers you can use to show how your social media programs are influencing business.  It's a tough problem.  Some folks, like Charlene Li, late of Forrester, put some thought into models for calculating ROI.   Others, like Jason Stamper, have come up with a calculation to come up with a value index for blogging (I've adapted Jason's formula for the webinar with David).

We measure and track everything we do at Eloqua, and we have some clever ways to measure social media engagement, and we make some assumptions about how our engagement out there in the Web 2.0 world translate to increased traffic on the corporate web site.  But we're just in year one of this project.

How are you reporting on the effectiveness of your social media intiatives?

Comments

[John Serrano]

Steve,

I attended the webinar and I enjoyed the information you and David shared with us. I own David's book and I will purchase yours as well. Could you answer a quick question?

You went over a formula using the metrics we already know:

I understand what CPL is but there were a few other things that I missed and couldn't write down.

What is:

HR =
ADL =
HSC =

[Keith Burwell]

Steve--Measurement gets tricky unless you know your desired results, in my opinion. To that point, we have a website leadmarketwatch.com that is ancillary to our core business (lead management). However, the website does a number of important things-- 1) it builds credibility, 2) it educates our consumers, 3)generates possible future business, and 4) serves as an important transparency in the lead market.

Therefore, the success measurement can be sketchy at best. Certainly we can track clients who have started searches on the informational website, but that doesn't tell the whole story. In fact, Seth Godin has a post today regarding frontlist and backlist material-- http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/09/how-often-shoul.html
This gets to the point--material posted in a social media format may end up being influential 2 years from now. Therefore, in my opinion, value has to be measured in the future--not just in the past.

[Steve Gershik]

Me too, David. I've got your book featured in a promiment place on my desk. It's the best book on marketing I've read this year.

[David Meerman Scott]

Hey Steve,

As we're sitting on hold waiting for this to start, I wanted to let you know that I'm looking forward to participating on this with you!

David