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Measurement for social media

By: Christi Dixon | 10/15/2007

What's the point of social media? How can twitter make a difference for a business? Are blogs helping to drive sales? Social media is actually more measurable than you might think! Shel Holtz helped facilitate a recent "unconference" for Ragan Communications and served as the opening and closing keynoter of the subsequent conference. He, along with other speakers, repeatedly talked about the power of engagement. (You'll see similar themes from my colleagues who attended BlogOrlando--conversation is taking the place of dissemination.)

How valuable is engagement? (In the larger sense. . . with your employees, constituents, consumers, friends, industry peers) The measurement tools are evolving quickly to keep up with new metrics. What are the metrics? Site visits, time spent, content creation, collaborative filtering, commenting, tagging, rating, voting, bookmarking, testimonials, product reviews, product feedback, blog posts, message board posts, crowdsourcing (asking questions and seeing what content comes back), trackbacks, diggs, pings... PHEW! Honestly, I can't tell you how all of these work yet, but measurement gurus among us can lend a hand.

Another presenter, Todd Andrlick, spoke about how something static, like the corporate newsroom, can foster engagement and add some meaning to your organization's outgoing information.

With social media in the marketing mix, communicators are no longer paper-pushers or content-creators; we're in Shel Holtz's words, orchestrators. Let's grab a baton!

Posted in Social Media, Digital Communications