This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the fourth & final pillar, Measurement.

Today’s post wraps up our series on the Four Pillars of Social Media here on Social Conversations.  In this series we covered how to research, plan a strategy, engage your audience and use measuring techniques in your social media marketing efforts for your company.  Whether it’s a small business, a B2C or a B2B business, these fundamental concepts are what will support your social media marketing strategy, make it strong and successful.

I wanted to round out the series with a piece that reminds marketers, directors, senior management and the c-suite that social media marketing is unlike any other online marketing strategy you may implement.  Since the concept of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) have become such a prominent force in the online marketing world because they can be measured through analytics by seeing the Click to Conversion ratios, companies have become very focused on this to decide whether a program is successful or it failed.

Unfortunately these types of measures don’t work the same way for your efforts in Social Media Marketing.  It’s a lot more complex because engagement in social media communities very rarely leads to a person clicking on your link and then purchasing your product or service.  You also have to factor into the whole scheme of measuring your actions online whether its SEO, PPC or media buying, was that “Click” affected by something you did in Social Media.

Take for example engagement in forums.  Say you have a team from your engineering department out in a Ruby on Rails forum discussing the latest things they’ve implemented using RoR.  Someone who’s been lurking and watching your team share it’s knowledge posts a reply in the thread saying “hey thanks, you guys really seem to know your stuff, this helped me a lot”.  The next thing that person does is looks at one of your team’s bios.  They then look at their profile on LinkedIn, then look at your company’s profile on LinkedIn.  From their they click over to your blog and read a few of your thought leadership posts.  After they read those posts, they forward one on to their managing direct with a note that says “these guys seem to really know their stuff, can we utilize them to help us XYZ project?”.

The managing director was looking at other companies to help and had never heard of your company until his engineer suggested your blog post.  Now he’s looking at your company’s profile on LinkedIn, not only that he’s checking out who recommended you and those companies to see if they are like his company.  He then clicks on a link to your latest presentation on Slideshare, he passes that on to the CTO, saying “this company is really impressive, I think we should use them with XYZ project”.

Now the CTO is checking your company out, he’s reading your blog too, but he’s checking out the comments from other companies on your blog and your interaction.  He clicks on a link to your tweet stream and sees you’re interacting and sharing your knowledge with the community about relevant topics, not what you sang in the shower.  Now, he too is impressed, he emals back to the managing director “please contact them and set up a meeting, you’re right they really seem to understand our industry very well”.

The managing director now types into Google your company name, first he clicks on a PPC ad you have (by mistake), then backs up and clicks on the first result, which leads him to your homepage.  He finds the link to fill out the contact form, and now you have a lead.

So who gets the credit?  If you were just looking at analytics, some may say PPC, some may say SEO – never did any of the people click into your site first.  Their first encounter was in a forum about Ruby on Rails, their next was LinkedIn, then your blog, then SlideShare, then Twitter.  The last steps were search and then the click into your site to fill out the contact form.

Sometimes it is pretty easy, you can see a click to a product from a link on Facebook, Twitter or a blog post and can see the results.  However, more often than not, the above scenario that I just outlined for you happens hundreds, if not thousands of times a day online.  Marketers just aren’t aware of all the steps customers are taking to get to the “conversion”.  So how are you measuring that?  Are you accounting for this type of scenario in your ROI or bottom line of your entire marketing plan?

Just because social media marketing doesn’t lead to that instant “Click Conversion” doesn’t mean it isn’t working, it means you have to work a little harder to measure its success.

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the fourth & final pillar, Measurement.

Finding where relevant conversations around your brand or company are taking place can be an arduous task.  In order to succeed at finding the conversations when they are still fresh, a mixture of free and paid tools are typically utilized.  While many of these tools are still in their infancy, they generally do a fairly good job at finding conversations that are specific to keywords that you believe are relevant to your brand or company.

There is an additional tool, however, that you already have in place that you’re likely not using to help find relevant conversations.  That tool is your web analytics package.

What Advantages can a Web Analytics Package Provide?

Your web analytics package will obviously function differently than your free or paid social media monitoring tools yet it will still provide valuable information that will allow you to quickly engage in relevant conversations.

One key advantage deals with the type of data your web analytics package reports on.  Rather than looking for keywords that are used on social media sites, your web analytics package will be reporting on visitors being referred from social media sites to your site.

Another advantage of your web analytics package is that it likely is reporting the data in near real time.  That means you can immediately know when a conversation is taking place that’s referring visitors to you site.  With social media monitoring tools, you can look more broadly with the use of keywords, but the freshness of the data that’s returned is reliant on how quickly or slowly the tool finds the conversations.  In some cases it could be hours and in others in could be days or weeks, so augmenting the data from social media monitoring tools with your web analytics data can potentially decrease your response time to relevant conversations.

How can You Find the Relevant Data in Your Web Analytics Package?

In your web analytics package there is an enormous amount of data relating to your sites visitors.  Knowing how to sift through that data to key in on what’s relevant to your needs is a vital step to finding additional relevant conversations in the social media space.

For this post I’ll use Google Analytics as an example, but you could get similar data from any of the leading web analytics providers.

It’s essentially a two step process to get setup correctly.  The first will be creating a custom report and the second will be creating an advanced segment.

Creating the Custom Report

Basically, with a custom report you want to setup a way to find social media sources that are driving visitors to your site and then determine the actual referring path from each of the sources.  This is done by creating a custom report in Google Analytics.

As the dimension you’ll want to use Source and then Referral Path as a sub dimension.  In the metrics area you’ll want to at least add Visits, but you can also add additional metrics that can give you more insights into the visitors being referred.

Once you’ve saved the custom report, it will allow you to spot social media sites that are driving visitors to your site.  You can then click on any of the sources and see URL(s) within the social media site that’s referring the visitors.

As the report currently stands, all sources will be present when looking at the report.  To help you sift through all the sources you’ll complete the second step in the set up process.

Creating the Advanced Segment

Creating the required advanced segment can be done in two ways.  You can create an advanced segment that keys in solely on a defined group of social media sites or you can create an advanced segment that excludes your top non social media referring sites.  I prefer the later since it doesn’t limit the number of social media sites that are included in your advanced segment.

To create the advance segment, simply generate a list of your top referring sources.  Create a new advanced segment and add “Source” as the dimension.  For the condition you want to select “Does not match exactly” and then simply add in the first non social media source as the value.

Continue adding additional sources until you feel enough sources have been excluded to allow you to easily go through what remains and pick out the social media sources.  The result should look similar to below, but likely with additional sources added.

This can also be done using regular expressions in the value field, but for visual sake I’ve broken each source out in a separate OR statement.

Once you’ve completed these steps, you’re ready to combine them.  To do that, drill in to the custom report you created and then select only the new advanced segment.  You’ll now be able to spot the top social media sites that are driving visitors to your site.  Click on any of the sources and you’ll be able to see the actual page they were referred from.

You can then go directly to the page and determine if it’s appropriate to engage in the conversation that’s taking place.

Remember that this is in no way a replacement for a social media monitoring tool, but it can be used to augment what you get from such tools as well as potentially decrease your response time in certain cases.

I get a lot of questions about how I approach Social Media Marketing. The team here at Serengeti Communications has a very methodical approach, we like to ensure a solid foundation for every strategy that we put in place for our clients. In doing that there’s four fundamental ideas, or as I call them “Pillars” that help stabilize any efforts taken into social media marketing. As a team here, we decided that we’d like to share some of our experience and knowledge with the 4 Pillars of Social Media in a series throughout the month of June. Each week, we’re going to have 2 to 3 posts on both Social Conversations and on Endless Plain about each week’s Pillar.

• The first week we’ll be discussing the first pillar of social media marketing: Research. Those posts will be published between June 1 and June 4th, 2010
• The second week we’ll be discussing the second pillar of social media marketing: Strategy.  Those posts will be published between June 7th and June 11th, 2010
• The third week we’ll be discussing the third pillar of social media marketing: Engagement. Those posts will be published between June 14th and June 18th, 2010
• The fourth week we’ll be discussing the fourth pillar of social media marketing: Measurement. Those posts will be published between June 21st and June 25th, 2010

We’ve also designed specific training around the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing, with two areas of specification:  B2B and B2C.   These two types of businesses take rather different views when it comes to each one of these pillars, that’s why the training we provide to our clients addresses the specific needs of these two very distinctly different types of business.

So stop by next week when you’ll get the first edition of our Four Pillars of Social Media based around Research.