MeasurementCamp is a wiki that is dedicated to providing resources for any company interested in measuring their communication in social media sources.  They have divided up their list of tools into sections based on what you want to measure (your return on investment). 

 If you want to measure how visible your brand is to other people on the internet, there are a few sites you can use.  HowSociable? is a tool to help you determine that.  On this website, there is a search bar where you can type in your brand’s name and then click the button that says, ‘Measure Visibility.’  From here, a number of boxes will come up and give your brand a score in 22 different metric areas.  These include Google, Facebook, and Twitter searches.  These scores are generated from the number of posts, pages, photos, etc. that have mentioned your brand name. 

 If you want to search the blogosphere, Technorati is one site that is able to help with that.  You can search for top blogs based on links, posts, or tags.  This can allow you to see the most talked about topics and allow you to search for what people are saying about your company. 

 If you want to keep track of the buzz floating around the web, Trendpedia is a useful site.  This site tracks finds trends in social media and keeps track of who is discussing what, when, where and how.  You can set up Trendpedia to track posts and articles about your topic every day or just on a specific day.  This helps you stay informed about what is being said about your company or idea.

 Other categories for measuring social media that MeasurementCamp includes are message board and Twitter searches, measuring website traffic, and searching data.  Also, you could search through multimedia sites, such as YouTube and Flickr. 

 There are many ways to measure your use of social media and it all depends on what you determine your return on investment to be.  It could be qualitative or quantitative, but you need to be able to measure so you can know whether your actions are successful or not.

 Todd Parsons, from Buzz Logic, in an interview with Katie Paine explains how Buzz Logic works and how it relates to social media through advertising.  He states that Buzz Logic looks at all the conversations and finds the people who drive the conversation on certain subjects.  They figure out who is the most influential on a certain topic and who can gather audiences around that specific issue.  They find the influencers that you want and make them available to you, so engagement between your company and these people can occur. 

 As Parsons states, advertising and social media are still fairly new ideas, especially in content.  Buzz Logic finds the most influential people and isolate them.  Then, they rank their conversations they start.  This helps you decide which conversations you want to take part in.

 Knowing who is an influencer already can help you decide which social media strategy to pursue.  It can help determine what type of social media you want to engage in.  Influence is important because, as I said before, you want an active audience that will draw more customers to your site and therefore your company.

From a blogpost by PRSquared, More on the Menace of Marketing Measurement

In my previous posts, I have talked about how companies should always measure to determine the return on investment of their actions.  I have written that company CEO’s will want to know this so they can know what to do and how to invest their money. 

 Yet, some experts, such as Katie Paine, have stated that measuring the ROI for blogs is a waste of time.  She defends her statement by assuming that everyone already knows the power and the results of having a blog.  Once you know that you need this certain technology, then it is a waste of time to measure because you already know the value of the blog.  You know that the consequences of removing the blog far outweigh the benefits of keeping the blog up and running. 

 Shel Holtz responded to Katie Paine’s post in his own blog.  He stated that people are caught up on the fact that return on investment relates to money.  He says that we should look at it as a cost or a risk benefit analysis.  Holtz counters Paine’s statement that measurement is a waste of time by saying that many executives fear the consequences and still do not understand the benefits of blogs yet.  He feels that measurement is still needed at this time to keep proving to executives that blogs can create benefits for their company.  Once CEOs see blogging as essential to their company, then measurement will not be required. 

 Windsor Media Enterprises responded to these postings, by Katie Paine and Shel Holtz, about the measurement of blogs.  They tended to agree with Katie Paine.  They said that the value of blogs is too intangible and is a waste of time to measure.  They feel that as long as a few things, such as blogrolls, links, and comments, are included in your blog, you will receive those intangible returns.  Also, to get these returns you need to connect your links, branding, and conversation.  If you do these things, Windsor Media says that measurement is not required because you will already know the benefits. 

 Yet, measurement is still a needed skill to have whether you agree or disagree about measuring blogs.  Katie Paine concludes that if you want a job in PR, you better make sure you have math and analytical skills for measuring.

 In a survey done by Roberto Rocha for the Montreal Gazette, he found that only 18% of the people surveyed actually use forms of social media for their companies, but 75% of the respondents said they use a form of social media by themselves.  Also, 60% of the companies surveyed do not have any type of social media in the works, so there is no potential for expansion in this area. 

 There are many reasons why a company might refuse to see the potential opportunities for growth that social media provides.  David Wallace, co-founder and CEO of SearchRank, provides some reasons.  Some of these include that a company does not know who would write the blog, it costs too much, and there is no control. 

 Another reason he provides is that there is no one who could monitor any of the social media sites.  It all ties back to the fear of measuring the results of your actions.  Wallace explains how companies feel that their staff is too busy to deal with these social media sites and everyone has something else to do.  While this might be somewhat true, Wallace points out that when the Internet came to the forefront, companies hired in-house groups to manage their websites.  If a corporation has a company website, they have to have someone running and maintaining that site.  Whoever this person is most likely has the knowledge and the resources to update their system to include social media sites and monitor them. 

 Companies should not ignore this opportunity to engage customers because it is becoming the norm.  Most companies probably have someone capable of taking on this task anyway.  By entering the social media world, a company can grow and create relationships they didn’t have before.  Measuring the impact of social media sites should not be a roadblock.

 This is the underlying problem with this social media.  Determining the results is still a work in progress and each medium can be measured in any number of ways, depending on your definition of return on investment for any campaign. 

 Don Bartholomew, Principal of Acumentics Research, which is a social media and public relations research and measurement consultancy, states in his blog that measuring a mediums click-thrus or views won’t suffice anymore.  Companies want to how consumers are being influenced and engaged.  They want to know the impact of their actions on the company.  Simple statistics just doesn’t cut it anymore.  They don’t want to experiment now, they want facts to back up their decisions. 

 To do this, communication practitioners need to figure out the best way to measure the results of the new media that their company wants to use.  They need to evaluate the influence they have, the outcomes that come from it, and determine their return on investment. 

 In another blogpost, Bartholomew suggests some considerations for choosing the best social media measurement tactic.  You need to know what you specifically want to track, how content is brought to the site and which sites of these are most important.  You also want to know what type of analysis to conduct: automated or human analysis.  Also, engaging consumers and the cost of measuring are two other important aspects to consider.   

 Proper measurement of your new social media is essential.  Companies need to know this information before making any experimental decisions in 2009.

Picture from Onalytica Blog, in a blogpost explains how Person A might intially influence many, but those do not go on to influence many more. While Person B does not influence many in the beginning, those influenced go on to influence more and more.

While measuring the outcomes and return on investment are good ways to determine if a social media tool is affecting other people, another place to look would be to influencers.  Your blog may be popular, but popularity does not always add up to influence.  You want to know if the people you are influencing are in turn influencing more and more people.  You will want to have a chain reaction instead of a one-stop situation. 

 Heather Yaxley, a teacher of CIPR qualfications and a part-time professor at Bournemouth University, states that real influencers have credibility and can be trusted as a spokesperson.  Even if you reach a large number of people, can they be trusted to influence other people, therefore bringing a larger audience back to you? 

 These ‘real influencers’ that you want to reach are an active audience.  They reach another audience that might be beyond your initial scope, but are another active audience that will get drawn to you, because of the first set of influencers.  This is the kind of chain reaction you are looking for.  You are looking for the influence, not the popularity.

 Yaxley references Google as the “word of mouth on steroids.”  A Google ranking is a measurement of a site’s popularity, but not necessarily it’s influence. 

 So how do you really measure influence?

 Flemming Madsen, publisher of the Onalytica blog, gives an example of how influence is actually measured.  He wanted to find out who the world got information from about the bird flu.  They wanted to know who people relied on the most, which would be the person with the most influence. 

 To measure influence, they used the method of citation analysis.  This is where you collect everything that has referenced a certain topic, which then creates a specific equation that will provide the relative influence of each journal, article, website, etc.  The equation figures out who was referencing whom.  It looks at how the chain reaction was created and identifies the influencers.

 In a self-made video, Jason Wells interviews Katie Paine on measuring ROI in social Media.

 Paine explains how there is no standard measurement to quantify social media.  (Even though you can read more about measuring at her blog, The Measurement Standard!) But Paine goes on to say that you need to attract the right people to your blog and measure the visitors that stay and return to your site.  You need to determine an audience and what the return is that you want from these people. 

 You can measure the traffic of your blog if you just want to see how many people travel through your site.  Along with measuring traffic, you can measure the number of links, comments, and trackbacks to your blog.  Here you type in your blog name and this will pull up the information you want about your blog.  You might want to also determine the ratio between the number of your posts and the amount of comments you receive. 

 These are ways to quantify the return you are getting from your blog.  This will help you get started on measuring the value of your blog, but you still want to keep in mind the ways that the outcome of your blog might be more important than just numbers.

Katie Delahaye Paine, explains six steps to quantifying blogs and other social media on the web. 

Ms. Paine describes the ways to get started on measuring how successful you can be.  You need to know what motivates your audience and to measure this you need to remember that audience member behavior can show up in many different ways.  It could be your return on investments, responses, attendance at different events, votes, etc.  But instead of only looking at these activities quantitatively, you need move past that and look at the end result.  What are people doing differently now that they have used the information you provided?  What made them change their mind?  You need to ask these questions and track the behavioral answers.  This will help you to figure out what your blog or other new social media you have created can take credit for.

For how many blogs out there, it is sort of like how the advertising market has become.  People are overwhelmed by how many advertisements that are pushed at them that they are now refusing to see the ads and skipping over them.  They are now specifically searching for what they want and overlooking the rest.  Blogs are being created everyday.  People might be not be bombarded with every blog that comes up, but there are an overwhelming number of blogs people might stumble upon.  While someone might reach the site of your blog, you do not know if they stayed and read your blog or just kept going on to something else.  Knowing how many people passed through your site could be helpful, but not in the long run.  It would be much more beneficial to know how many relationships you are creating that will be sustained over a longer period of time, than just a few seconds that it takes to glance at a screen and move on.

Knowing who is reading your blog and actually using the information you provide is important to know for anyone trying to create a successful blog.  You will want to know the impact you are having on your audience before you continue.  You want to know this because if you know who is regularly visiting your site, you can tailor information to suit more specific needs.  Angela Sinickas says in her article, Measuring the Impact of New-Media Tools, it is better to know who reads your blog, so you can know the impact that it can create.  It would be better to know that a reporter read your post and wrote about you than knowing that 30 people visited your site today. 

You can create better outcomes for yourself if you can target whom you want rather than how many people you want because if you get the right readers, they will communicate and more readers will come.

 You cannot use traditional means to measure the success of new technology.  People are moving and do not want to spend time filling out mail-in surveys, which your corporation would then have to wait to receive and then review anyway.  Time is becoming more valuable everyday and cannot be wasted. So… learning to measure new social media effectively is very important.  You can begin to measure this technology  by the number of blog posts about your company, the number of comments, the tone of the posts and comments, video views, click thrus, how many visitors to your site, and how much content on the first page of a search.  These are just some ways to start, but not necessarily the only ways or the best ways. 

 Jon Gibs, the Vice President of Media Analytics at Nielsen, describes a program called Buzzmetics at Nielsen in the video provided below.  Gibbs explains, toward the middle of the video, that new blogs are important to measure, it does come with problems.

These problems are caused because this social media is so new and has not had time to find the best ways to be measured. So how do we know the best ways to measure our social media tactics? We don’t. But we can try to find out.