Quantifying Social Media has been and continues to be a challenge.  Measuring numbers isn’t such a challenge—it’s the “Social” part of Social Media that makes it difficult.  Compete and Quantcast can give good ballpark impressions for blogs, manually counting Twitter followers is simple enough, you can use click-thru’s to measure calls to action and Radian6 to trend chatter and sentiment.  All of these apply to measuring anything on Social Media.  The challenge is measuring the part that links back to the only reason anyone is participating within these channels– emotions, passions, etc.

Quantifying how people feel is tough.  I’m a firm believer that the true success and reach of a social media campaign is the average of many different things that you can measure.

1. The metrics I describe above are essential.
2. Organic Pass-along can be assessed for online using the same measurement methods. However, it has to be treated as a correlation since—in most cases—you have no hard proof that your efforts caused that effect.
3. How dynamic is your campaign’s coverage? This requires interpreting what other people are saying and assigning a metric to this interpretation, which is a value call.
4. How targeted was your coverage – is the blogger’s audience who you want to reach?  This entails being familiar with what the blogger has written about in the past.
5. How sticky is it—as in, will the campaign info remain in place a while? A blog is up indefinitely, while a Tweet is more fleeting.
6. Did a spike occur on the client side? This includes a spike in web traffic, coupon downloads, etc.

These are just a few aspects we like to measure.  As you can see, some involve measuring the intangible or entails a value call—this is the “Social” part.  Eventually, I think we’ll come up with a measurement number that is akin to the Slugging Percentage in baseball. A hitter’s value is assessed by getting on base, scoring, and many other integral factors—not just batting average.   In our case, this would mean averaging all of these different measurements and assigning some kind of “Social Slugging Percentage.”

In the meantime, we analyze everything that can be measured and combine this with anecdotal evidence (i.e. coverage highlights) in order to tell a compelling story. Our clients seem to like this approach.

This blog posting may have created more questions than it answered!  The good and bad news is that no one has the definitive answer—and so the exciting challenge of quantifying the intangible continues.