Measuring the outcome of your new social media requires tracking the change of behaviors of the audiences that view your blog, video, or listen to your podcast. To do this, you first need to identify what behaviors it is you want and then compare that to what is actually happening. To analyze this, you could directly ask people what changed their behavior. Another way would be to move your focus from one aspect of your blog to somewhere else a few times, and record the responses and behaviors that follow these changes you made. Measuring these behaviors is measuring the outcome.
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.
