Social Media Integration and Metrics

I find that these are two articles are incredibly helpful with both shaping your social media programs, and implementing metrics to measure their success.

Businesses often stumble on how to implement social programs for marketing purposes, as it differs greatly from traditional marketing practices.  Reference to this guide, can help to construct a framework in which social media programs can be applied to business processes.  From there, metrics remain ever so important to prove these programs worth.  In the past, measurements have fallen into the following groups:

Return on Engagement: The duration of time spent either in conversation or interacting with social objects, and in turn, what transpired that’s worthy of measurement.
Return on Participation: The metric tied to measuring and valuing the time spent participating in social media through conversations or the creation of social objects.
Return on Involvement: Similar to participation, marketers explored touchpoints for documenting states of interaction and tied metrics and potential return of each.
Return on Attention: In the attention economy, we assess the means to seize attention, hold it, and measure the response.
Return on Trust: A variant on measuring customer loyalty and the likelihood for referrals, a trust barometer establishes the state of trust earned in social media engagement and the prospect of generating advocacy and how it impacts future business.

However, as we progress forward and social media utilizes more advanced strategies, simply measuring actions will not sufficiently represent the effects these programs can have, or the cost...or in effect, the return.  In 2010, we should definitely see an advancement in these programs, and their evolution into fundamental marketing strategies.