Blogs, Twitter, Facebook it’s all the hype with today’s marketers and leaking into the fabrics with business owners and entrepreneurs jumping on the latest buzz words and making a best attempt on understand what all of this Social Media means, and how it can work for their business.

Reminds me of the dot com era when businesses jumped on the cart to put a website online, but not truly understanding how it will work for their marketing and business and provide value, other than doing it because everyone is, and of course bragging rights.
I receive at least 3 of these questions a week, and many more of prospects calling in asking for these services, but not understanding what they are, how they work, or most importantly, what value and ROI will they receive out of it. And this is where we begin…needs, objectives, metrics and ROI. Though while every self-proclaimed “Social Media Expert” may have the answers that sound good to the prospective client, the proper answer simply is understanding what Social Media components will work best for the prospects/clients business, and presenting those key performance indicators to benchmark those components, and the resulting ROI. Too many web marketing companies and publishers will have different ways and means to measure a Social Media campaign success, and while many may be correct, the rapid growth of Social Media space has resulted in to many complimentary metrics to gauge campaign performance and effectiveness. So a good starting point is to first understand some standard definitions for Social Media metrics to give a foundation of how to measure Social Media campaign success, and from this, tailor the metrics to the clients objective(s).

IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) released in early 2009 a proposed standardization of these Social Media metrics to lay the foundation for publishers and online marketing experts to get everyone on the same page. Similar to early days of the web and analyzing website performance by the various metrics available at that time – hits, page views, visitors, etc.

The Social Media Metrics standardization expands on the fundamental metrics in an effort to make campaign reporting for agencies and advertisers more consistent and less wild-wild-west. You can download the Social Media Metrics document here. It also offers some segregation between 3 distinct channels of social media; and supplementary metrics for each channel; Social Media sites (ex. Facebook), blogs / blogosphere, and widgets and applications. (more…)