Online Marketing Blog

As I’ve been able to travel and meet marketers all over the U.S. and in other countries, I am always interested in learning how companies are viewing the value of their social media efforts.

Marketing investments should be predicated by more than chasing the competition, satisfying someone’s ego or acting solely on a gut feeling. A good handle on goals, resources and target audience help determine strategy and tactics as well as how outcomes are measured. This is the case with even the most fundamental of marketing programs. With that kind of basic framework, implementing and measuring value from social media shouldn’t be that different.

Because so much actual marketing is tactical, many companies see social media simply as another of those tactics and evaluate one-off promotional efforts for ROI without considering the bigger picture. It’s very much a situation of not seeing the forest for the trees.

Social media monitoring and social media measurement are two very different things, but I think many of the searchers and social media taggers using those phrases don’t always make the distinction. For some quick insight from a qualified audience, I turned to Twitter and within an hour had about 40 replies.

It started off with this Tweet: Twitpoll: What’s a better term: “social media monitoring” or “social media measurement”?

Many of the responses were a specific selection of “measurement” or “monitoring” but most pointed out that social media measurement and monitoring are different things. Monitoring is what you do to find information which you can then measure.

It was a pretty neat application of using Twitter for a quick poll with near immediate responses from professionals that might not respond to traditional polling methods. Below are the actual replies: