Yesterday we launched the first tweet chat aimed at discussion and conversation about social media metrics, both measuring and monitoring.  The focus of the conversation was around “Are Free Monitoring Tools Enough to Measure Your Social Media Efforts”.

There’s a lot of confusion out there about what to mesaure and how to measure it.  People are finding that a mix of free tools, paid tools, home grown tools and spreadsheets can all work together to accomplish their tasks.

We’ve taken the transcript of the #SMMetrics Tweetchat from yesterday and made it into a PDF that you can download and print, or just view.

• #SMMetrics Tweet Chat Transcript 09/09/09

Next week @nathan_linnell (Nathan Linnell) will be heading up the TweetChat and topic will be “What Metrics Are You Using to Track/Monitor Your Social Media Efforts“. To follow or join in the conversations around social media metrics just follow the hashtag #smmetric and include it in your tweets so we’ll see your questions and contributions.

#SMMetrics Tweet Chat is Every Wednesday at 1 p.m. EST.

Last week I had the distinct pleasure of presenting on three panels and at the last minute, the honor of getting to introduce Thursday’s keynote speaker, Charlene Li.  As an avid fan of the book Groundswell which Charlene co-authored this was a real honor to do no matter how last minute it was.

Charlene had a lot of great nuggets of wisdom in her presentation which focused on the How to Prepare for the Future of Search and how social media is affecting it each and every day.  The biggest piece of advice was probably the hardest for any SEO or PPC professional to comprehend; Focus on the Relationship with People, Not the Keywords People Use.

Conversations in Social Media

That was the point of my presentation at Search Engine Strategies as well.  The session “Managing Social Conversations” included myself, Dave Evans of Digital Voodoo, Mike Volpe of Hubspot and Brian Kalma from Zappos.  The whole panel had that focus too, in social media its about the relationships and conversations you are having with your audience that ultimately win the day, not the keywords that drive those conversations.

There were two primary focuses to my presentation, the first was that social media needs a strategy.  That requires a bit of work to create something successful.  Research, defining and measuring all go into strategy – it’s not just tactics like putting up a Facebook page, or starting a Twitter account.  If you don’t have a sound strategy behind doing those tactics, your efforts will most likely fail.

The second focus on my presentation was on measuring and monitoring.  Without measuring and monitoring how does a company know that what they are implementing with their social media strategy is really working?  Unfortunately most companies have been conditioned to relate success to a “click to purchase” ratio.  In social media this type of action rarely happens.  So what’s a company to do?

In Social Media – Measure Something Different!

So what do you measure?  How about interaction, involvement, influence and intimacy?  These are all factors that can be measured and proven to affect the bottom line of a company.  These can be measured and monitored through buzz monitoring tools and web analytics, its just a matter of understanding the data and turning it into actionable data. This is what our new social media white paper: “Social Media Impact: Unicorn or Elephant” is all about, so sign up for it if you are interested in learning more about doing Social Media the right way.

You can take a look at our Social Conversations presentations including the ones from SES SanJose and connect with us on Slide Share.