There is no shortage of things to measure in social media, from inbound links, site traffic, comments, “likes”, check-ins, the list goes on. The part that takes some thought is figuring out:

1. Which of these metrics matter at all
2. What they actually mean
3. How you can connect them back to your overall marketing success metrics

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves and into the black hole that is social media analytics, let’s step back, remember where we came from and discuss some basic principles that you probably learned in your Communications 101 class as a college freshman.

Communications Engagement Metrics

Modified from Lindenmann’s Effectiveness Yardstick

Using this tried and true communications effectiveness yardstick is a great way to visualize your social media metrics. By organizing the social relationship data that you collect in relation to the strength of the relationship that it dictates, or where it places someone within your sales funnel, it is able to give you a stronger understanding of how others are engaging with your brand’s various social media channels.

Here is an example of how you may translate Lindenmann’s chart to fit the social media metrics you are tracking for your campaign. While this will change for every organization, you can see how your social media marketing data can be organized in a series that is able to help you grade the relationships that your campaign builds.

Social Media Engagement Metrics

Blindly gathering Facebook fans and Twitter followers is a fruitless effort. While that should never be ultimate goal of any social media marketing program, it still may be an important step in moving users to higher levels in the pyramid and closer to the behavior that you want them to express (most often picking up the phone and giving someone on your sales team a call).

Organizing data this way can also identify areas where users may be dropping off of the pyramid in droves and don’t continue to higher (and more valuable) social behaviors. With this knowledge, specific tactics and campaigns can be built to alleviate the bottleneck and continue that upward movement.

Because after all, it isn’t about having the data and knowing how to organize it. It is more important what you DO with that data.

But simply installing WordPress onto your server and publishing a few posts isn’t enough. Here are a few tips on how to turn your corporate blog:

Create A Content Calendar

Have the topics, but not necessarily the titles of your blog posts set at least one month in advance. While this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be allowed to vary from this schedule, having a plan moving forward for how frequently you will post and the types of content you will share greatly reduces the chance that you’ll end up in the blog graveyard.

Leverage Existing Google Analytics/PPC Intelligence

Having a good understanding of current site performance, which leading organic search keywords are driving traffic to your site and which keywords offer the best conversion rates can be great ways to optimize the focus of your blog. After all, the best predictor of future success is past behavior. Learn from what works and what doesn’t, no matter what channel the intelligence comes from.

Your in-house SEO or Google PPC expert will also likely be one of the best resources moving forward to analyze your blog’s Google Analytics reports to measure progress and optimize your blog.

Publish A Blog Comment Policy

Comment policies are an almost forgotten part of corporate blogging. They are an easy way of setting standards and rules of engagement on your blog to make sure that everyone plays nice. No one wants a flame war to break out on their site and have to make up rules after the fact.

Comment policies are like car seat belts. You hope you will never have to use (enforce) them, but if you ever do, you will be glad that it is there. Here is one that we use for our client, Joslin Diabetes Center.

Define Responsibility, Share Ownership

Getting a blog off the ground can be a daunting task, so it is important to clarify exactly who in your company is ultimately responsible for the success or failure of all blogging initiatives. That person, or team, will define the structure, frequency and standards of the blog. There can be endless arguments about who exactly within the organization should own the blog, from marketing, to PR, to advertising, to HR, but the most important thing is that it goes to the team with skills to make the blog successful, no matter how you decide to define success.

But in reality, unless you work for a company of one, corporate blogging should never be done in a silo and participation should come from all departments. The blog owner should act as the shepherd, organizing and prioritizing everyone’s blogging efforts and keeping each contributor focused on how they can contribute to the overall goal.

Syndicate Your Content

The web is all about connections, so build as many as you can that bring visitors to your blog. Submit it to directories like AllTop, social news sharing sites like Digg and Delicious. With the right following Facebook and Twitter can easily become some of the top sources for referring traffic to your blog, so don’t forget to syndicate links to new posts across all channels as they are published.

You should also make sure that information on how to subscribe to your blog is easily identified. Beyond simply offering an RSS feed for users to subscribe to your blog posts, don’t ignore email. Even if your audience is very tech savvy, they may prefer to stay updated on your blog posts via email instead of RSS. Rather than fight the battle of convincing your readership what you think you know what is best, give them the option to subscribe through multiple channels and let them choose their favorite.

Read, Network, Comment

The best blogs discussions often happen within the comments section and not even within the posts themselves. That is why fostering a community around your content is invaluable. Identify the top 20 blogs within your focus area and subscribe to them. Read each new post as it gets published and leave comments. Lots of them. Hundreds of them even. Find other active bloggers by identifying others that are commenting on your favorite posts. Subscribe to their content as well and continue the commenting cycle.

If you enter a career in social media, be prepared to fail. Fail hard, fail big and fail often. But most importantly of all, fail EARLY.

The simple truth is that the vast majority of work that the “typical” social media marketer does on any given day has never been done before. If it has, it hasn’t been done long enough to have the pleasure of relying on a solid foundation of best practices. At best, we follow a general set of guiding principles translated from other marketing channels to best predict what will work and what won’t.

Game-changing strategies may look bullet proof on paper, but completely bomb once they hit the execution stage and launch onto the web. Other tactics that see wild success on Facebook may completely flop when translating them to Twitter and visa versa. There is nothing that can be done to evade this. It is the simple cost of doing business in this industry. Social media marketers constantly balance the changing tools of social networking platforms and their influence on the psychology of our audiences. No social media marketer can be perfect all the time, but they can find success through flexibility.

That is why failing EARLY is of essential importance. Ingrain solid measurement into your social media marketing and monitor for failure as soon as possible (before the point of no return) so you have the opportunity to learn from your experiences and address them immediately.

A program isn’t a failure if isn’t able to deliver on its anticipated results. It is only a failure if it isn’t measured, acknowledged, analyzed and retooled into a new and stronger marketing strategy.

Boston was the latest stop on his cross country book tour sharing his story. Tony went from running one company that was heavily focused on short-term profits to one that is heavily focused on the best customer service and customer experience. He sold the former because he hated getting up every day and going to work. The latter is experiencing record revenue and has spawned a separate company, consulting businesses on the best ways to adopt their philosophies.

At Zappos, Tony developed a set of core values that became more than just something written on a plaque in the lobby. It became something deeply rooted in the company’s culture to the point that they are willing to fire employees based on not adhering to the core values, independent of their job performance.

Tony’s focus on building a company culture rooted in not only delivering happiness to customers, but to employees, is rooted in the idea that a company’s brand is merely a lagging indicator of its internal culture. The best branding strategists in the world could develop a messaging platform that would resonate with target customers, but if it didn’t make itself apparent when a customer visited the website or picked up the phone to talk with a customer service representative, it would be all for naught.

Customer service shouldn’t be a department. It should be your entire company.

The most refreshing part of Tony’s presentation was the night and day comparison between the two company’s that he ran. He also wasn’t afraid to admit the laundry list of mistakes he made when running the first company.

Because of the lessons he learned from the mistakes he made, he was able to build a foundation for Zappos that would drive the company through the recession all while making record profits. When you have a company culture and a passionate customer base that markets your company for you, you don’t have to worry about shifting strategies to keep afloat in tough economic times.

The one question that was stuck in my mind as I left the event was, “How do you measure happiness?” Sure, my clients can tell me that they are happy with the experience that CommCreative provides, but how do I know if I can be making them happier? Do I have a realistic impression of my threshold for delivering happiness?

1. Social Media: I’m a geek at heart and am obsessed with understanding the latest web tools that are influencing how people communicate, build and manage relationships online.
2. Triathlon: It isn’t uncommon for me to spend 15-20 hours per week of my free time training for endurance sports events. It is my biggest passion outside of work and keeps my mind fresh. Most notably, I’m currently training for my first iron distance triathlon next week. (2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike and a 26.2 mile run)

At first you may think that these two passions are polar opposite. A geek and a jock in one? In reality, over the past five years, I’ve honed the skills necessary to not only be successful in each endeavor individually, but also prepare me for the inevitable challenges of the other. 

Goal planning

In triathlon training, every workout has its purpose and is diligently designed and scheduled to meet specific short term and long term goals. No training session, whether it is a 2 mile jog or a 135 mile bike ride goes without examining the short term goals of the day as well as stepping back to understand its role in brining me one step closer to the final goal.

The same is true of social media marketing. A solid understanding of the workflow necessary to complete a task, as well as how that finite task plays into the larger picture, is an essential skill to be successful. Whether it is driving Twitter conversations, inbound links or developing a blog content calendar, anything done without a focus on the value that it brings to the entire program is a waste of mental energy and physical resources.

Risk management

The risks associated with 55 mph mountain descents on a bike with little skinny tires all while negotiating traffic, road conditions and wind direction doesn’t really need to be explained. The balancing act between speed, performance gains, safety and injury prevention is constant. I’ve become able to pretty accurately determine how much training volume and intensity my body can handle without crossing the line to cause serious injury while building fitness.

Every single piece of content created through social media channels we manage on behalf of clients opens another opportunity to impact our client’s reputation, spark controversy or incite customer response. No action is every taken or any “submit” button is ever clicked without assessing all of the potential risks and rewards of engaging through social media channels.

Pacing

Endurance events are all about pacing. It doesn’t matter how fast you can tick away the first two or three miles of the race if you can’t sustain that pace all the way until the finish line. It takes a constant evaluation of your energy output to make sure you don’t dip into the red and have to shuffle your way to the finish line, or even worse, call it quits and grab a cab back home.

The social media equivalent of pacing is scalability. It doesn’t benefit the agency or our client to recommend marketing strategies that simply can’t be sustained because of inherent restrictions that we know about internal approval processes or available resources, we are just digging a deeper hole for the both of us.

Community building

Especially in training for my iron distance triathlon next week, I’ve come to the firm realization that while I’ll be out there racing alone and am solely responsible for generating the power to bring myself to the finish line, I could not have even made it to the starting line without the support of my friends, family and coworkers. They have made countless sacrifices to give the opportunity to meet my athletic goals.

Community building is a root skill of social media marketing. This is where a background in psychology drives success just as much as an understanding of the tools themselves. Being able to aggregate a disconnected group of individuals to not only share the same goal but stay in regular communication and work in unison can sometimes feel like trying to eat Jell-O with chopsticks. Patience, determination and focused execution are key.

Program Analysis

One of the biggest fears of many triathletes is of stepping to the starting line without being prepared to push yourself through the course and to the finish line. No amount of mental grit and gusto will bring you to cross all 140.6 miles if your training hasn’t prepared your body to handle that level of abuse. Because of that I am constantly evaluating speed, heart rate and nutrition among various other factors in my training to determine not only that I’m progressively getting faster and stronger, but that I’m on track to be at the fitness level that I know I need to have come race day.

The same is true for how we approach ongoing social media programs. It is not all that dissimilar from traditional marketing programs. Benchmark setting, continuous analysis, refinement and continuous improvement is the name of the game. We don’t recommend the tactics that offer us the largest profit margins or utilise the latest social media tool that we’ve been itching to test out. With frequent and transparent measurement and analysis our clients know exactly what is working, what isn’t and how close we are to that finish line.

Embracing the Unknown

Also known as: Boldly go where no man has gone before. Triathlon challenges my body to endure challenges that it has never faced before and builds the confidence to do it all over again.

Likely the biggest challenge of social media marketing is building programs and utilizing tools that no one has ever attempted before That is simply the nature of the business. The web is moving so fast that you cannot rely on mirroring your competitor’s case studies and expect to be successful. Rather than remain fearful of the unknown and all that has yet to be tested, we’ve trained our minds to think strategically enough to confidently step into the dark unknown with a clear marketing plan.

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Outside of this list of skills that I’ve developed through working in social media and challenging myself through triathlons, I’ve also come to learn that there is immense professional networking value in my personal athletic adventures. From fellow triathletes that I meet while training referring business my way to the numerous times that I’ve met other endurance sports fanatics at local networking events, I rarely go more than a few weeks without seeing the recurring business value of my personal investment into the sport.

It also doesn’t hurt that while golf has been the dominant businessman’s sport, triathlon is slowly nipping at its heels. If you don’t believe me, believe Fast Company and Bloomberg.

Photo Credit: Eric Willis

The benefit of hanging out on the bleeding edge of technology is the endless list of tools that are at your disposal. The challenge is understanding exactly what your client’s needs are and choosing the best tools from your arsenal that will not only deliver the results they  need, but also function effectively within the company and industry restrictions that are in place. Social media idealism has no place in working within these strictly regulated industries. There is only room for creative thinking and innovative strategy that has plenty of life beyond just the brainstorming meeting.

Find yourself a strategy that takes the best of what is available in the world of digital marketing tools and is able to run smoothly within the framework of your company’s marketing and communications capabilities and you’ll not only have a strategy that will meet your goals, but be able to reach its highest potential to deliver value.

Image Credit: Joe Philipson

But  what happens when your marketing “pond” dries up? After all, you don’t expect that you’ll be able to push out the same cookie-cutter marketing strategies year in and year out, do you? The world is changing much too quickly to be able to hold that assumption for very long.

What happens when your tried-and-true Google PPC campaign takes a swan dive, when your unopened direct mail piece fills up recycling bins across the country or Facebook decides to go an entirely new direction and ditches the brand page that you’ve worked so hard to build? Many times the best bet is to move on to new waters to remain successful. With that move, there is a significant chance that you’ll be moving into an arena where no one has yet ventured, let alone proven that success is possible there.

The true test that determines those who will be succeed in future marketing efforts will not be those who are the early adopters of the latest technologies and communications channels, but the ones who are smart enough to adapt.  Smart enough to retain the lessons that they learned in their old fishing holes to optimize their campaigns and bring home much bigger fish than the rest of their competitors. Communications channels and media behavior are changing rapidly, but ultimately, fish still really like worms. Wherever you go, don’t forget that.

Photo Credit: James Loesch

While it’s a common belief that primary social media metrics consist solely of things like comments, discussion volume, trending topics, share of voice, Facebook “fans,” Twitter followers and retweets,  the truth is that these do not matter at all. Even if you are given the directive to “go get more followers/fans,” I beg you to challenge that position. Instead, you should work to understand where the request is coming from adjust activities to meet the underlying needs that are driving the discussion.  Getting their new advertising campaign to trend on Twitter may be an interesting anecdote, but when budgets are being cut, it won’t be enough to save someone’s job.

What all marketing programs need to focus on, whether based in traditional or new social web tools, is lead generation and driving sales.

Rather than beginning your social media program by looking at the online community, the media they create and share, the digital channels they occupy and then brainstorming on how a social media monitoring and engagement program can help meet your marketing goals, work backwards.

Instead, first consider what key marketing performance indicators are going to keep your company at the forefront of your customers’ minds for the next four quarters and drive fear into the hearts of your competitors. Connect those performance measurements to customer behavior online and start there.

By putting traditional marketing and communications performance indicators first, you can set the framework for all forthcoming social media efforts and avoid doing “social media for the sake of social media.” Build your social media programs based on the performance indicators that will not only keep you employed in a economic climate with such heavy marketing turnover, but earn that yourself next promotion.

Photo Credit: Cristiano Corsini

Here are some quick tips to optimize your Twitter account and get the most out of all 140 characters.

Clean up your followers list

Pay attention to your ratio of followers to following. It says a lot about the type of account that you are managing. If you are following-heavy, it tends to give the impression that you are new to Twitter and are working hard to build up your presence, but haven’t received acceptance from your audience yet.

If you are follower-heavy (like many celebrities) it tends to give the impression that you are selectively social, won’t necessarily reciprocate to messages from followers, but that the “Twitter-sphere” has give you their seal of approval and see value in your published tweets. In most cases, it is good practice to keep your following to follower ratio relatively balanced.

Here are two quick ways to help keep that ratio in check:

• Unfollow stale accounts that haven’t tweeted in +30 days by using UnTweeps.
• Identify non-mutuals through Twellow. What you do with this list depends on a lot of other factors, but knowing where to start is half the battle. In short you have two options: unfollow any account that doesn’t reciprocate or work to convert that list into becoming new followers.

A great way to work to make those conversions is to export that non-mutual following list from Twellow into a Tweetdeckgroup. With that list, you can monitor their discussions and specifically target them with public replies that are relevant to the discussions that they are participating in and encouraging them to eventually reciprocate and follow you back.

Use Bit.ly stats to grow your network

If Twitter users are using outside applications, either within their browser, on their desktop or on their mobile devices, Google Analytics won’t always attribute referring traffic to your site back to Twitter and it is hard to measure how often your Twitter links are clicked.

A lot of URL shortening services offer their own stats on click throughs that don’t rely on the clicks originating from Twitter.com, but also provide insight into who is sharing the same shortened URL. These stats are not only a great way to get around this data that Google Analytics misses, but gives you some powerful information to grow your network of followers.

If you are doing it right, you aren’t just promoting yourself constantly, but are sharing outside content that is relevant to your audience through Twitter. Use Bit.ly (the most popular URL shortening tool) to see who else is Tweeting links to the same content. There is a good chance that they would be relevant accounts for you to bring into your network.

For any bit.ly link that you post (or that anyone else tweets for that matter), add a plus sign at the end of the link to see how many tweets linked to that page, through what Twitter accounts, and how many times it was shared through Facebook and FriendFeed.

For example: http://bit.ly/axBFQR turns into http://bit.ly/axBFQR+

Scroll through the list of Twitter accounts linking to the same page. Consider that list to be what Twitter might look like if it suggested new followers for you in the way that Facebook suggests friends for you to connect with.

Plan the timing of your tweets carefully

So you know that your audience is on Twitter, but do you know when they are most active? Are you catching them at work, are they constantly connected or do they only check in when they are at home after dinner? Understand when your audience connects and time your Tweets accordingly. CoTweet is a powerful tool for a lot of reasons, but its scheduling feature is a great way to hit your audience right when they are looking for updates.

If your audience is very broad or constantly connected, it may be a good idea to repost your own Tweets 28 hours apart, so that you can hit the widest audience, no matter when they are connected or what time zone they are in. This can get you into some gray areas of spam territory, so needs to be done carefully and never more than three times for any one link.

Avoid Hashtag Spam

Hashtags are a great way to follow trends and participate in conversations that reach far beyond your follower network. As with a lot of things, many eager marketers wanted to be everywhere at once and started abusing the system. Hashtags streams are only as valuable as the tweets published to them. Abuse the system and you are only taking a sledge hammer to your home’s foundation.

Don’t Unfollow/Refollow

It has become a somewhat secret practice among many accounts to repeatedly unfollow and refollow accounts that do not reciprocate, sending them multiple alerts over time that they have gained you as a new follow. This is spammy, obvious and annoying. Simply stated, don’t do it. It screams that you are desperate to build a network of empty numbers, focusing on quantity, not quality.

Don’t Neglect Your Background

A well thought out Twitter bio and link to your site is essential, but many people don’t take advantage of all of the digital real estate behind your Twitter page’s main navigation. Take the time to create your own custom Twitter background with a design theme that matches your own site’s design for continuity.

While any text you put there won’t be clickable (unless you have installed ClickableNow and your page’s visitor has it as well) the power of strong images and clear messaging cannot be understated. Use the space to the left of your tweets with care to clearly define who you are, and why you are worth a follow.

Don’t Auto DM To Thank Followers

This has been said a million times, but bears repeating. Auto DMs to new followers, especially if you are just trying to bring them back to your site with a link, never put you in a positive light no matter what your intentions. They just make you seem insincere and self-centered.

Whatever minimal spike in site traffic this may bring you is outweighed by the damage caused to your reputation for blindly sending these messages to anyone and everyone. Want to thank them for following you? Reply to their questions. Retweet their links. Send them relevant links. Make them smile.

Note: These tips were written under the assumption that you have verified that the audience you want to reach is actually on Twitter and that you have adequately answered the question of what to actually tweet about. Both of those are an entirely different discussion for another day.

This is also by no means intended to be a comprehensive list, but a snapshot of some of the tactics and strategies that we have used to manage Twitter presences on behalf of many of our clients. We’d love to hear any additional tips in the comments section.

To that same point, wouldn’t you have doubts about taking advice on how to manage your company’s presence online from an agency that doesn’t blog, has one Twitter follower, can’t be found anywhere on Google and couldn’t find their way around an RSS feed?

Here at CommCreative, we are fortunate enough to be in the position where we get to learn on a daily basis from other marketing pros. Not because we are simply sharing war stories from the trenches through various discussion boards or LinkedIn groups, but because they reach out to US on behalf of THEIR clients to tell their stories for them. Trust me, getting a phone call from another PR agency trying to convince you to blog or tweet about their client while you are doing the same for your own client is an out of body experience, and one that isn’t all that rare around these parts.

We blog,  manage Twitter followers by the thousands, build communities on LinkedIn, Ning and share videos to our YouTube subscribers not just for the sake of creation, but as a gigantic and constantly evolving social media experiment. Read all the books you want on effective social media marketing. While you are curled up on the couch reading the latest insights from 2009, we’ll be in the “lab” testing our latest experiments created to help us understand anything from Twitter trending topics to blog syndication strategies. Then we get to turn that all around and bring back all those lessons to the client with the freshest understanding of online behavioral trends.

Now how do YOU experiment and test your ideas online?

Image Credit: Adam Rhoades