Anything worth doing is worth measuring. If you are a job seeker or individual concerned about your personal brand, measuring your impact on your network and beyond is important. If you run a business, it is critical! A close parallel is that daily annoyance in our lives that we know as a radio or television network. While these are one-to-many networks instead of a social network that is almost always a many-to-many concept, starting with a simple analogy often paints the best picture. It is intuitively obvious that a broadcaster must know if anybody is listening. This determines revenue which in turn impacts profitability and growth. So what happens when you tweet or leave a post on Facebook? Does anybody notice or does it pass like a fart in a hurricane? Take time to… er, smell the results.
So, if it is worth measuring, how much are you willing to pay? There are freebies that won’t tell you very much, but if you don’t go there you will never know anything. For all the grief that everyone seems to give Klout, there is some valuable information there. If you expect it to give you hard data it will be disappointing and the incentives they offer to lure you in are for the most part worthless. It does record your activity on various social media outlets, measures that impact, and even gives you a graph over time about your relative social clout on those specific outlets. My Klout score is 63 and hovers within a few points of that number, but Justin Bieber has a 96 so we are obviously not in the same league… thankfully. There are alternatives to Klout, but most seem to be volatile and come and go with the whims of the freebie seekers. [Edited: Klout joined the ranks of those no longer viable. It ceased to exist May 25, 1018]
Even an unemployment check is enough to buy a subscription to some very important low-cost social media analytical tools. Every small business needs to explore these options because they all offer some insight into where your messages go when spewed out into the cybersphere. I’ll mention Google Analytics along with these tools because even though there is a free version it seems to have become the default gold standard for measuring networking success or failure. It can be tied into blog activity through WordPress to gather data on the impact of posting online. Hootsuite is one of the best tools to incorporate many activities into one product and offers options to measure metrics. Sprout Social is another that will give you such insight.
For recent college graduates that think they know all about social media because they grew up using a computer and have a Facebook and Twitter account: You really don’t know crap. Forget about the politics of maneuvering in corporate politics and getting buy-in from smart people, if you have never considered how to budget for social media competing with other interests, measured social media impact, compared one medium with others for effectiveness, and calculated an ROI, you might not be ready for the responsibility the job carries. ROI does not mean Raised On iPhones. Listen and learn from true experts, take webinars or classes, and study the subject until you are bored to death. Then you may be ready.
I apologize for the “fart” analogy in the first paragraph. Sometimes the 7-year old me in my brain gets to the keyboard before I can stop me.Â
Some “light” reading:
- Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization by Oliver Blanchard
- Social Media Metrics for Dummies by Leslie Poston
- Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity by Avinash Kaushik
- Net Smart: How to Thrive Online by Howard Rheingold and Anthony Weeks
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