A great story by Shane Atchison from Clickz where he posted a detailed post on Social Media measurement.

My favorite parts:

“..social media is different than transaction, and it calls for a different approach to measurement. Today we look at the quality of relationships, experiences, and, yes, transactions, and we look at them over time. Unique visitors, for example, is still an important metric, but so is registered users. And more important still are metrics like return visitor sign-in.”

“We also look at the amount of user-created content, but we’re more interested in measures of qualified content consumption. It’s great if someone comes to your site and buys your product, but it’s even better if she returns for service, tells her friends about the product, buys an upgrade, submits a suggestion, blogs about your response to her idea, and so on.”

“On today’s crowded Web, the winners are the people who create the most value for both the customer and the business over time. And value happens not when people buy your product but when they use it and love it. Not when they upload a video, but when someone else watches it.”

“Here’s the other thing: traditional (broadcast and transactive) marketing measures tend to show campaign efforts’ effectiveness, and Web analytics tends to measure Web site effectiveness. But social media, because it enables you to listen as well as speak, offers the opportunity to generate true business intelligence.”

“Measuring marketing in social media isn’t about measuring your marketing to do better marketing, it’s about understanding the customer, uncovering opportunities, and informing strategy to run the business better. The real opportunity in social media measurement isn’t to see how well you’re doing in social media but to translate online conversations into true, actionable intelligence that informs business decisions.”

“The real challenges aren’t technological, but operational. You have to define the right governance policies to manage customer engagement through social media, and you have to build the right workflow to prioritize responses, route information to the right people, and manage your content even as you release it into the wild. Employees need encouragement to participate, and they need clear guidelines about exactly when, how, and where to get involved. It takes effort, but the payoff can be tremendous.”

Shane has some great insights here is the detailed story.

Thanks Scott we see the same “Angle” here. Social media will be transformative for many quality organizations.