Making measurement meaningful

You know the story: the resources have been invested, the content has been developed, you’ve listened, you’ve engaged… but now what? Is your approach working? Is the time investment paying off?

While social media has become a valuable part of the marketing mix for many of today’s companies, many recent studies show most measurement is ad hoc and scattered. Of those attempting to measure, few are doing it in a meaningful way.

The message was clear throughout the social media-focused sessions at ExactTarget’s Connections 2011: the next opportunity for marketers is to look at social content and conversations as data. Why is this important? Several reasons: competitive tracking, understanding your brand momentum, industry research, crisis communications, customer support and strategy evaluation, to name a few.

Think of each conversation as a number, then each post has a value. In the next few years, companies will—and need to—become more and more savvy about leveraging social media data. What can you start measuring today? Consider starting with brand mentions, sentiment, number of followers, retweets and replies. Marketers now have an opportunity to align and overlay data sets from multiple social channels with valuable sales metrics to determine if their investments in social media are paying off.

Are your investments paying off?

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Connections 2011: ExactTarget’s user conference wows again
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Social media success: Southwest Airlines’ rapping flight attendant