Hot Button: Social Media Metrics, to pay or not to pay

The biggest hot button issue in the Social Media Marketing world is metrics. Every company believes strongly in the need for metrics and find it difficult to report a true ROI to their management without some sort of numbers to back it.

Recently there has been an influx of companies that have attempted to offer some sort of solution for our metrics needs. They claim to be able to measure sentiment, overall exposure, and depth of your content. Let's take a quick look at what several companies in this space are doing, and we can analyze their effectiveness in this space.

Raidan6 :

Advantages:
Their claim to fame is there mentions tracking. They provide snapshots of what others in the social media world are saying about your company. If your "Brand" is mentioned, they will provide a snippet of the who mentions it and how often it is re-broadcast across the web.

Problems:
Like most tracking, this is a keyword based usage. This means that they track based on combined mentions of the keywords of your company. Keywords are easily mistaken and be complicated when attempting to track.

Trackur:

Advantages:
Same idea as Radian6. It's pretty, has some nice graph features. Can display data in inventive ways. Provides a decent snapshot of your overall sentiment and metrics in the social media realm.

Problems:
Same as Radian6. It measures keywords and tracks your own activity. While this is wonderful, we'll see in a moment what the real problem is with this.

Other platforms:
Viral Heat
Omniture

Overall Overview:
So the real problem with metrics is that we can't really tell who is seeing it and when its being seen. We can find out that our posts are being retweeted, but who's retweeting them and who is seeing the retweets. We never know the quality of our audience off of these programs. We get numbers, we get names, but we don't get any data.

It's like if the cable company tells me that they can get 100,000 people to see my commercial. Immediately I think, "Wow, that's great!" Then ten seconds go by and I realize, who is seeing it, are they my target audience, do they care about my product?

The same rings true with social media. The audience is massive, the information is everywhere, but is anyone of value seeing it?

Solution:
The real tracking solution is a daunting task. Track your success by really identifying your audience. Do you have major players in the blogging world following you? Do you have huge influencers in Facebook and Twitter who are talking about you? A campaign is ten thousand times more successful if they have 10 good influencers instead of 1,000 overall audience.

So to measure your campaign you must dig in. Identify your influencers. Go after them. Cater to them. Let them get involved, get an idea of your campaign and then spread it for you. It's the best way to succeed and its the easiest thing to measure.