I definitely agree with you. A lot of marketers who get into social media marketing don’t have a clue what to measure let alone how to measure much beyond “counting” the number of fans or followers they have. A lot of data mining and understanding how to pull, extrapolate and analysis of the data needs to be done. Especially if you want to turn that data into meaningful points that the C-Suite can understand how it all affects the bottom line.

Just counting, while it can be a good start in the beginning because you have nothing to base anything from, after a while can be misleading. The true way to measure the success and failures is by planning the goals behind those counts and how those counts affect things like sales, brand lift, sign ups, creation of evangelists, time saved at call centers, etc.

It’s a lot more than saying “hey we got 10 followers today!”

~Li

Maybe all someone really cares about is their sales- and that’s fine and easy to track the referring links, but what did you really learn about your customers, what worked, what didn’t, who was influential, who was a detractor?

Were you only measuring on one network (Twitter) and doing some ‘realtime’ Google searches? Again, that doesn’t work so well. It doesn’t give you any real feedback. You’re working with small datasets that are scattered points. What you really need is a lot of data about what was said on you, but also everything you can get about who said it and their networks.

Let’s put it this way, it requires a LOT more programming, datamining and statistical analysis to do this right than most of these ‘marketing experts’ can muster.