A while ago, I wrote a blog post on 5 ways to mea­sure suc­cess with social media mar­ket­ing. Today I ran across a great real-​​world exam­ple of the dif­fi­cul­ties mar­keters have when set­ting up and mea­sur­ing mean­ing­ful met­rics in social mar­ket­ing from Aliza Sher­man at Web Worker Daily.

I agree whole­heart­edly with Aliza Sher­man’s point that we are “using anti­quated ways of mea­sur­ing online activ­ity and inter­ac­tions. We are also ham­strung by how each site, net­work and tool defines and dic­tates mea­sure­ment in their own pro­pri­etary terms.”  Don’t I know it! In my con­sul­tancy, we’ve cre­ated and re-​​created cus­tom dash­boards to mea­sure the spe­cific inter­ac­tions that are impor­tant to clients. We’re rein­vent­ing the wheel all the time in this regard because of the lim­i­ta­tions of pro­pri­etary tools.

“Here are some key points I’d like to make about the prob­lems with social media mar­ket­ing mea­sure­ment. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these, and any oth­ers that may come to mind as you read this:

1. Social media is neb­u­lous. The term “social media” can encom­pass many tools from the Web 2.0 era, depend­ing on who is using the term and what they are try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate. There is no defin­i­tive, well-​​understood, totally agreed upon def­i­n­i­tion of social media, Wikipedia be damned. Lack­ing clearly defined and agreed-​​upon terms is a big bar­rier to mea­sur­ing anything.
2. It’s not social media, stu­pid. I don’t think any of us are actu­ally try­ing to “mea­sure social media,” per se. We’re look­ing to mea­sure the reach or”…read the rest of the blog post on the prob­lems with mea­sur­ing social mar­ket­ing here.

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