A discussion of what we really want out of this overwhelming trend to “do social media” and the question of how to measure whatever it is we are doing…

During my career I worked at a sales promotion agency, helping them to master the art and science of direct marketing. One of their production folks, Joe, was particularly adept at coming up with unique descriptions of things. One afternoon I came in to his office needing a quick measurement of a piece of card stock. With a smirk on his face,  Joe sat back in his chair and began to question me on really what I needed to know and why. Frustrated, I had no choice but to go along as Joe went through several measurement options with definitions on each – thickness, size, weight for postage, or to calculate machine-ability.

Finally he landed on what I figured out I really needed, thickness, so we could match to another piece of stock. Only too glad to extend my stay and ‘play’ with me, Joe picked up a tape measure off his desk stating that “this rule of inches just won’t do,” opened his drawer and pulled out a caliper. After making the measurement and reading me the results, Joe calmly suggested that I should have just told him why I needed the information. I just left thinking, “rule of inches, how amusing.”

Now of course, I look back and relate Joe’s awkward measurement moment to the discussion of social media measurement.  Everyone’s talking measurement and ROI, so they can have some specific statistic-based metric to secure approval and budget for continuation of their program. But, like the role of inches issue above, I’m not sure of really what they want out of social media…

And to top it off, I’m not sure what they really mean by “social media.” I like to think it means conversations and relationship building exercises, not widgets and Facebook applications. I use the terms ‘word of mouth’ and ‘advocacy’ often, in order to stay away from the trendy terms.

Still, we need to find some accepted metrics. Companies still need the ability to determine whether or not a social media program is working – staking a position in a customer’s mind, moving product or otherwise making an impact. But this all depends on what they were after in implementing their social media program in the first place. Okay, we can still figure it out, on the ROI level as everyone seems to need.

So, is the program about a company’s reputation, or conversations, or customer relationships? If so it might be more qualitative – which brings up more questions. Is the brand already part of the target audience’s conversations?  Is the company or its product being compared to its competition?

To define success, we might ask if we can build better relationships, or get into conversations where the firm wasn’t included before, or move from the one-to-many megaphone monologue to a true dialog with customers and prospects. Further, we might measure what happens to potential customers after the initial contact, which products do they buy, how do they use the products and how to best increase the long-term value of each individual customer.

Some of our clients suggest their goals are to gain a better SEO ranking, or to develop more traffic, or gee, even sales (the ultimate if they dare). Here we can count RSS statistics for posts, their popularity and how it is shared on many social networking sites like Google or Digg or Del.icio.us.    We can track traffic, subscriber count, keyword optimization and additional trends with Google Analytics or Omniture. We can even get useful data on SEO and social bookmarking. And we might count the numbers of friends and connections we’ve earned in a period, how much activity is happening like the number of posts and discussions, and of course, how much traffic was generated and the click thru rates to product pages to generate sales.

But the real key to all this measurement stuff is to decide what you want out of social media in the first place. So, as Joe asked me many years ago, what is it you really need to know and why? Let’s start there and see what you say. Let me know, okay?