My Answers

After reading Kami Huyse blog, Social Media Measurement: Let's Talk About the Bottom Line and the Dreaded ROI, it inspired me to come up with some answers of my own. I realize as a young professional my answers are not going to be nearly as prevalent as the other bloggers Kami asked to answer her questions, but I thought it might be interesting for others to see what new professionals thought of measuring social media. Those names, and Kami's post, can be found here.

DISCUSS: Do you think measurement of social media is important, and why?
Yes, the more I learn about social media, the more I hear how important it is to measure the effectiveness of these tools. Throughout my college career I have always been told that your objectives must be measurable. Social media isn't any different, in fact it may be more important because social media is such an effective communication tool.

RESOURCES: What are your favorite resources for social media measurement? Do you recommend any methodologies? For those of you that have them, can you point to posts about measurement you have written in the past?

This question is hard because I haven't had any experience measuring social media. The only knowledge I have is what Kelli Mathews has taught me in her class, her choices can be found here. I can say this, with the use of social media becoming more popular, I would like to have more emphasis on measuring social media in our curriculum. Kelli Mathews does a good of this, but on a whole I think classes get across the point of needing measurable objectives, but lack in actually showing you how to do that.

EXAMPLES: Do you have any examples of measurement you have used in a social media campaign. Did these campaigns have any positive business outcomes (ROI) and/or relationships)?

I only have one example of measuring social media, and it's not all that impressive. My company just recently put on a campaign that I was fortunate enough to get involved with. A part of this campaign targeted 18-24 year olds, specifically college students. To better reach this target audience we set up a MySpace page. We did this for a couple of reasons:
1) Inform people about our campaign/contest.
2) Open dialog with our target audience. We encouraged people to post comments/questions that they had about the contest.

To measure this, we tracked the number of visitors that linked to our Web site from our MySpace page. I don't know the exact software they used but for the time invested in making and maintaining the MySpace page, it was definitely worth it. Like I said, weak example, but I am confident that I'll have more/better experiences measuring social media in the future.