Social Media Metrics & PR Camp Atlanta

inally getting a chance to put down my thoughts from PR Camp Atlanta.  It was billed as the un-conference and that’s what made it very interesting.

There were four teams, each working through a number of similar questions and that led to some good discussion and learning.  The key session topics were:

1. Get clients and bosses to extend their interest in new media
2. Help senior professionals tap the social media experience of junior colleagues
3. With PR and marketing blurring, determine the best ways to measure success

The biggest insight for me was the concern for marketing ROI and metrics.  In social media, there are quite a few metrics.  Certainly Facebook isn’t delivering everything that’s needed, but there are some early signs of good metrics.

Social Media Metrics

Overall there is definitely some (to put it kindly) confusion as to the use and purpose of metrics.  Applied generally to marketing and to social media specifically metrics have two purposes:

• Measuring and optimizing the use of the site and actions in the community.  For example, Twitter now has a strong following of third party metrics and analytics software providers to help Twitter users grow their follower base and to follow others.  These include TweetBeep.com, TweetDeck.com, Tweepular.com and many others.
• Measuring and optimizing the use of the site to drive revenue, profit, brand and share (These I define as the true measures of ROI).  There are a number of tools that provide the kinds of outputs that can be analyzed to determine the net effect of social sites on critical ROI measures.  In order to make the connection with revenue or other ROI measures.  For example, how many click-throughs were received from Facebook or MySpace?  As for sentimentality and other important metrics Scoutlabs and Radian6 offer some interesting capabilities that can be used to analyze social media at a deeper level.

Once you have these numbers and with some intelligence you can then measure and analyze how each of these communities are delivering on the business goal of revenue, profit, brand and share.
If you have any thoughts or questions, please let me know.  You can also follow me on Twitter at @GuyPowell.  Please tag with #ROMI.

Comments

[twitter.com/warrenss]

Guy, Sounds like PR Camp Atlanta was a great conference experience! Thanks for recommending Radian6.

Warren Sukernek
Director of Content Marketing
Radian6