Measuring Social Media
Mariah Lincoln Herman
University of Oregon
@Marlin23
School of Journalism and Communication
www.marpr23.wordpress.com

Intro to Measurement
A problem that a lot of companies are
having right now is measuring the success
of social media campaigns. An issue that
may arise for up and coming public
relations and marketing professionals is
explaining to a boss that social media is
important and beneficial to a company. I
have gathered some information that
might help if you are asked to explain
how to measure social media and why
companies should invest time and money
into it. Hopefully you will find it helpful.

Why Measure?
If your boss asks you to qualify your
social media initiative, you can use
measurement to concretely show how
your time is being spent and why social
media is valuable to the organization.
“The main reason to measure objectives is
not so much to reward or punish an
individual communications manager for
success or failure, as it is to learn from the
research, whether a program should be
continued as is, revised, or dropped in favor
of another approach.”
-James E. Grunig, Professor Emeritus,
University of Maryland

Getting Started
In order to be successful in measuring social
media there are six essential steps that need
to be clearly defined before implementing
the measurement strategy and using the
measurement tools.
1. Define your mission and objective. Figure out what it is
that you want to accomplish.
2. Define your audiences and find out what motivates
them.
3. Define the metrics your company is going to use, these
become what you measure (qualitative or quantitative,
but preferably both.)
4. Figure out the benchmarks for your data (over time,
against competition.)
5. Establish what measurement tools to use.
6. Analyze the results. Data are trivial unless you can do
something with it.

What to Measure
When implementing a measurement strategy, Katie Paine, expert on
measurement, explains that it is important to establish what it is exactly that
you need to measure. To figure this out you need to come up with answers for
the following questions:
Outputs:
• Did you get the coverage you wanted?
Outtakes:
• Did your target audience see the messages?
• Did they respond to the messages?
Outcomes:
• Did audience behavior change?
• Did influential members respond?
• Did your relationship change?
• Did sales increase?

Qualitative
It’s important to determine what you want to
measure, whether it’s corporate reputation,
conversations or customer relationships.
These objectives require a more qualitative
measurement approach. If the objective is
to measure ROI for conversations, start by
setting benchmarks with questions like:
• Are we a part of the conversations about
our product?
• How are we talked about compared to
our competitors?
• Were we able to build better
relationships?
• Were we able to participate in
conversations where we previously had no
voice?

Quantitative
If the goal is to measure traffic,
sales or search engine optimization
(SEO) ranking, you can take a
more quantitative approach. Look
at how many people join your
social network in a given period of
time, how much activity there is in
your forum or what the click-
through rate is to your product
pages that result in direct sales. By
searching for keywords in different
online communities, you can
create a detailed “blueprint” for
engagement, which will be useful
for demonstrating success to your
boss. The diagram on the right is an
example of Brian Solis and Jeff
Thomas’ blueprint, called the
“Conversation Prism.”
Among Many. (2009, April 2 2009) picture posted to
http://tiny.cc/Map235

Explore Tools
To measure how effective a social
media campaign is, the company must
observe, listen and engage.
There are a variety of tools available
that can help your company in
measuring different objectives and
figure out where your organization is
being represented.
The Tool
Delicious:
Delicious is a bookmarking utility that lets you
share, organize, and save your bookmarks across
the web.
What should you measure
How many times people bookmark your content

The Tool
Google Analytics:
This will allow you to track your traffic levels and will allow to identify where your traffic is coming
from.
What you should measure
• Overall traffic increases
• Where your traffic is coming from, i.e. digg, twitter
• Most trafficked key terms or phrases
The Tool
Feedburner:
Feed burner allows you (and your visitors) to subscribe to your blog via RSS or email.
What you should measure
• RSS subscribers
• Email subscribers
The Tool
Blog comments:
Pretty self explanatory, these are just the comments/feedback users leave on your site.
What you should measure
• Amount of comments
• Quality of comments
• Influence of commenter

The Tool
Twitter Search/Tweetbeep:
Twitter search allows you to search for keywords or phrases in real time, Tweetbeep sends you alerts
when someone mentions your particular keyword/phrase/product/etc.
What you should measure
• How many times your product/company/article/etc. is mentioned. Trend this over time to see
progress.
The Tool
Google Alert:
Google alert gives you email notifications when someone mentions a particular keyword or phrases.
What you should measure
• How many times your is mentioned daily, weekly, monthly. Trend this over time to see progress.
The Tool
Tweetburner:
Tweetburner allows you to track how many times people click on the links you share via Twitter.
What should you measure
• How many times people are clicking on the links you send out via Twitter.
• Track the most popular categories and types of links people click on the most.
• Track how active your twitter followers are with you content.

The Tool
Yahoo Site Explorer:
Yahoo site explorer is a tool created by Yahoo that allows
you to track links.
What you should measure
• The amount of incoming links you receive over time.
Other sites that are useful:
HowSociable? - Free tool that measures the visibility of a
brand on the web across 22 metrics.
Technorati - Technorati search page allows you to search for
blogs based on tags.
Alexa - Comparative site traffic reports. Includes estimated
reach, rank and page views.
Google Insights - Compare search volume patterns across
specific regions, categories, and time frames.
Flock- is a web browser that provides social networking and
Web 2.0 facilities built into its user interface. It’s a feedreader
supporting Atom, RSS and Media RSS feeds. Blog editor and
reader, allowing direct posting into any designated blog.
Bit.ly - URL cruncher with dashboard metrics enables
measurement of number of clicks, countries clicked from,
conversations around the site etc.
Adonomics - Facebook analytics and developer application
tracks and produces graphs.

Measure
By using the tools above you can measure
a lot of different aspects of your social media
initiative. In order to demonstrate, to your boss,
the effectiveness and success of your efforts make
sure you measure the following aspects:
1. Traffic: This is one of the more obvious ways of
measuring social media. How many people
visit your website, Facebook page, unique
visits, page views, linkbacks, etc.

2. Interaction: Participation is a valuable
indicator for many brands. It says something
about the kind of traffic you are attracting.
Remember that an engaged customer is a
highly valuable one. Interaction can be
anything from leaving comments, to
participating in support forums, to leaving
customer reviews and ratings. It can happen
on your website and on other websites.
3. Search Marketing: A well placed
story/video/image on a site like Digg will
generate a lot of traffic and a link from Digg
itself. Even better it will generate interest from
bloggers and major publishers. The more links
and referrals, the better your chance of being
placed highly on Google, resulting in lots of
ongoing traffic.
4. Customer Engagement: Engagement is key to
improving satisfaction, loyalty rates, and
revenue. By listening to customers, and letting
them know that you are listening, you can
improve your business, your products, and your
levels of service.

6. Sales: Companies can track sales from
Google referrals and monitor customer
feedback through sites like Twitter, as
well as their own website. Dell discovered
that it made $1m from Twitter in 18
months.
7. Retention: A positive side effect of
increased customer engagement is an
increase in customer retention. Zappos,
which is a case study in how to do
Twitter, made $1bn in sales, and 75% of its
orders are from repeat customers.
8. Profits: If you can improve customer
retention and engage customers more
often, the result will be that you’ll
generate more business from your
existing customer base. This reduces your
reliance on big customer acquisition
budgets to maintain or grow profits. It
makes for a more profitable and efficient
organization.

One of the biggest worries executive have is negative brand perception resulting from bloggers rants or Tweets.
The loss of message and brand control intimidates companies, and often times prevents them from engaging in
social media. Companies need to look at these situations as opportunities to engage their customers and
communities. By doing so, organizations can turn around negative perceptions and build a loyal following. Take
Dell Computers for example. This company has experienced a significant turnaround within the world of social
media, transitioning from “Dell Hell” to a very loyal community on its sites.
Four years ago Jeff Jarvis bought a Dell computer and was having a lot of problems and got no response from the
customer service department. He decided to use BuzzMachine to blast Dell saying “DELL SUCKS. DELL LIES. Put that
in your Google and smoke it, Dell.” His first post generated 93 comments, the next few generated more than 1,000.
Since then Dell has changed some major operational procedures:
• Michae Dell returned to run the company after three years
• Overall quality was improved
• Dell began participating with bloggers and social media experts.
The Dell community has become a strong and loyal forum, and it is working for Dell. The company listens,
participates transparently, honestly and openly. They even admit when there is a defect with their products,
and allow customers to voice suggestions on Ideastorm.
Statistics:
• At start of program, 49% of blog posts were negative. Today, overall tonality is 22% negative.
• Direct2Dell currently ranked about 700 on Technorati, among the highest corporate blogs.
• Direct2Dell gets more than 5 million unique views per month.
• Over 7000 ideas have been submitted via IdeaStorm.
• Studio Dell is gets more than 200,000 views per month.

Success
Measuring and monitoring your social media initiative is
an ongoing process. The process has many benefits like
lower cost per customer acquisition, because it
enables you to be found by customers looking to buy
what you have to sell: It lowers the entire cost of the
marketing to sales process. It also lowers the cost of
market research; because it enables you to listen in on
the conversations, you can better tailor your products
to what the marketplace wants or needs.
The objective of a social media campaign is to
participate in the conversation, to enhance your
relationship with your audiences and become a
trusted member of the community that surrounds your
brand. If you have monitored and engaged in the
conversation, then your measures should prove that
you’ve done those things.
If you follow these steps and continue to monitor the
conversation, you should be able to clearly
communicate the success of your campaign.

Sources
Geoliv. (2007, October 23). Dell’s Incredible Turnaround. Message posted to
http://nowisgone.com/2007/10/18/dells-incredible-turnaround/
Macnamara, J. (2009, January 11). Measuring Up: 10 Social Media Metrics.
Message posted to http://www.themeasurementstandard.com/Issues/1-
109/macnamarasocialmedia1-1-09.asp
McDougall, M. (2009, March 26). How Do You Measure Social Media
Marketin?-Metrics and Analysis. Message posted to
http://www.sinotechblog.com.cn/en/2009/03/how-do-you-measure-
social-media-marketing-metrics-and-analysis/
Owyang, J. (2008, October 16). Social Media Measurement: Dashboard Vs. GPS. Message posted
to http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/category/social-media-measurement/
Patterson, L. (2008, November 18). Measuring Social Marketing and Media.
Message posted to http://www.marketingprofs.com/8/measure-social-media-marketing-
patterson.asp
Straley, B. (2009, February 19). How to Measure Social Media ROI. Message posted to
http://blog.meteorsolutions.com/2009/02/recent-article-on-mediapost-
titled.html?fbid=lQRWsQ5EXlc
Uhrmacher, A.(2008, July 31). How to Measure Social Media ROI for Business.
Message posted to http://mashable.com/2008/07/31/measuring-social-media-roi-
for-business/
Referenced multiple posts from:
Paine, K. KD Paine’s Measurement Blog. Messages posted to
http://kdpaine.blogs.com/kdpaines_pr_m/