Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

This week brought with it some exciting news and stories in the area of social media measurement and, since I didn’t write any of them, I thought I would do my part to highlight some favorites.  I’m not going to trust myself to say that I’ll do this every week, I probably won’t.

Here are a few recent nuggets of measurement metal you might find helpful or interesting:

1.     Radian6’s Practical Social Media Measurement & Analysis – In the March issue of their Community eBook, Radian6 puts together a concise and insightful guide to measuring and analyzing the primary objectives of social marketing including Cost Savings, Leads, Conversions and Sales, and Awareness, Attention and Reach.   Each section explains the process and includes example metrics you can use to analyze the performance of your programs and generate clear and visible results.

2.    Dag Holmboe’s Social Media ROI App – Dag has posted a series of Social Media ROI explanations on his blog, and his most recent post demos his Social Media ROI Application, which plugs in specific metrics of your program and spits out some interesting insights into its ROI.  You can demo the lite version of his app here.

3.    Google Analytics on Facebook Pages – This helpful how-to made the rounds late last week, and piqued my interest as I have made it known my disappointment in the current iteration of Facebook Insights.  I highly recommend this read and testing out Google Analytics on your Facebook page for further insights into referrals, visitor statistics, and more.

4.    Omniture Partners with Facebook – AdWeek announced last week that Omniture will be adding Facebook advertising data to its dashboard, allowing for greater insights and comparisons against campaigns running on other networks like Google.  This is great news; however, I tend to agree with KD Paine’s view that data may be incomplete.  Some of the most successful ad campaigns on Facebook direct users to a Facebook fan page, or the CTA is not a click-through but to fan the page from the ad itself.  Since the action is often not of direct sales, one must measure true success through the relationships developed by way of these conversions such as conversation volume, changes in sentiment, etc. which Omniture will not have.  I’m interested to see where this goes.

If you have additional stories regarding social media measurement and analysis please leave them in the comments!