Measuring Social Media Success - an Interview

Yesterday, I conducted an interview and conversation as part of our Facebook Marketing 2.0 Group.  Although the interview was originally scheduled to be with Katie Paine of KDPaine & Partners, we ended up speaking with a methodologist from her team, Peter Kowalski, as Katie was pulled unexpectedly into moderating a meeting of her own at the last minute.

The audio from the 55-minute call is located here and can also be found (along with some comments from conference call participants) on the Facebook event listing.  The conference call - which was extremely well-attended - just begins to scratch the surface of the rich topic of how to measure the success of your social network or social media campaign.  This is a topic that I hope I will be able to come back to again and again, because I know there is a lot of interest.

Among other things, KDPaine and Partners looks at the placement of where and how people are talking about a company, before and after a social media campaign. Peter's tips included

1) Setting clear objectives prior to the campaign
2) Being precise about your definitions - saying you want more "engagement" is not enough; what does "engagement" mean?
3) Trying to integrate your measurement work with other research work done within the company, including integrating with other marketing and media metrics. 

He stressed that simply counting eyeballs or clicks -- the basic measurement that most folks do -- is just not good enough.  Proper measurement of social media means measuring connections and relationships. 
Social Media maven Howard Greenstein was kind enough to take notes on the call and summarize the content for us at the end.  He's also threatened to blog about the conversation at http://howardgreenstein.com/blog/.