With our involvement in the PR, search and direct marketing industries through consulting and speaking at conferences, we’ve seen a huge boost in resources allocated to understanding and implementing various social media marketing tactics.
Despite that, the meaning of social media as a marketing/PR channel doesn’t seem to extend outside personal universes of interest. ie, search marketers often look at social media as using tools like Digg or StumbleUpon to drive web site traffic. PR practitioners often see social media as a branding tool using sites like YouTube & Facebook.
Regardless of the intent, social media marketing efforts are moot unless methods of measurement are in place. Which leads me to the Reader Poll Question:
What tools do you use to measure social media marketing efforts?
- Standard Web Analytics (WebTrends, Hitbox, Google Analytics, etc) (51%, 41 Votes)
- Several Different Apps (Feedburner, Subscription to RSS Queries, Compete, Technorati, Socialmeter, etc) (30%, 24 Votes)
- Social Media Monitoring (BuzzMetrics, Relevant Noise, Cymphony, etc) (10%, 8 Votes)
- Other - see comments (5%, 4 Votes)
- A home grown solution (4%, 3 Votes)
Total Voters: 80
Loading ...I wanted to keep the actual poll options brief and am really looking forward to seeing specific tools and their context of use mentioned in the comments. Our reviews of BuzzLogic, Collective Intellect and Radian6 are overdue but will be posting soon. They will be followed by reviews of several other tools related to social media metrics and a roundup of resources related to the topic.
http://sphinn.com/story/15099
🙂
Well, of course I use the tools of my company, Collective Intellect, Media Intellect intelligence monitoring and predictive intelligence reporting
Great poll. I’ve recently vetted measurement firms and the whole process led me to believe there’s no one good solution. A combination of traditional free methods, in-depth using a service and even anectodal input should all be used, but based on the goals and objectives of the client or brand.
I use a mixture of most of the above, depending on what I am trying to achieve with a particular piece of content.
When you write an article and 90% of your subscribers open it you might look on that as being a hit, but the article only generated one 3rd party comment, very little traffic, and 2 links.
Compare that to articles on PageRank recently which though they might not have had the open rate in feeds generated 100s of links and comments, and brought in new subscribers.
I think it is important to balance these things in some way such that as many different metrics grow over time.
I am still looking for an email solution that will allow daily scheduled RSS > Email suitable for marketing purposes (Aweber / Getresponse type features)
Measuring the rate at which someone clicks a subscription button for RSS subscription currently for my blogs isn’t worth it, because the numbers are too small to mean anything, and only a small percentage use the buttons.
I check awstats nearly every day and google analytics less frequently. Also view wordpress dashboard for new link activity. Don’t do much else other than that.
I use Google Analytics… 🙂
Measuring the conversations also become vital…
We use Clicktracks. The ability to segment and label anything you want and then dissect it all the way down to IP in a matter of moments is something that’s become very valuable to us.
Great idea for a poll Lee… love to see you repeat it soon so we can see how things are trending. I’ve just published an ebook on the topic for 2008, and it would be great to collaborate going forward, particularly as I start to consider the 2009 book! It’s at http://www.socialwebanalytics.com.