Great post Kami,
I wonder if it would be possible to use these indicators as the components in a social media index. I think it would be a neat experiment to see if we could track a series of blogs in particular topic areas on this index.
Would you be game to do this? If so, maybe we could pull in a few other people and share the development and the work.
Joseph Thornley | Homepage | 04.02.07 - 9:44 pm | #

I definitely see absolute unique visitors as the most important metric. That and return visits. It's one thing to get them there, it's another to get them to return.

Recently, my blog was linked into Stumble Upon, another new social network. It was fascinating watching the stats go through the roof. But did it mean anything? I'm not sure. Only time will tell.

Interested in your thoughts about Digg...
Geoff Livingston | Homepage | 04.04.07 - 5:42 am | #

Kami,

So you don't like the hypothesis stating trackbacks are dead? because, that being said, links from other sites, the google page rank etc. lose their values.

I'd also like to question the measure of "time spent on the site". In times of Firefox etc. Tabs just remain open, therewith adding time, but without significant expressiveness. I believe there are much more measures that have to be taken into account, the most important one - we agree here - is returning visitors.

Cheers,
Sebastian
Sebastian Goeres | Homepage | 04.04.07 - 9:27 am | #

RE: meaningful stats. . .

PRWeb released a new tracking system last week. We're experimenting with it now. So far, the stats are much more meaningful/insightful than the former page views - for us and our clients. We use Snag-it to capture the results in .pdf format and then email our clients. Wrote a post with a link to a .jpg of PRWeb's revised access method report yesterday titled "PRWeb Results: 5/98,026 on Google News." Feel free to contact me for more information.
Barbara Rozgonyi
Barbara Rozgonyi | Homepage | 04.04.07 - 8:25 pm | #

Wonderful mention.I definitely see absolute unique visitors as the most important metric. Especially your eight meaningful measure of social media. In times of Firefox etc. Tabs just remain open, therewith adding time, but without significant expressiveness. I believe there are much more measures that have to be taken into account, the most important one - we agree here - is returning visitors. It readers have to click around five to six pages to find what they want. Measuring this metric just encourages bad usability for readers.
yy | Homepage | 04.16.07 - 10:03 pm | #

I think in an ideal world we should also have a look at the tonality of comments and of the blog posts linking to the blog - in addition to the possibilities you mentioned. Time will show if it works...
Thomas Pleil | Homepage | 11.06.07 - 2:05 am | #

Thomas; I have to agree. I think that we should. The tools are getting better to help automate some of that, but right now it takes a lot of personpower to get that kind of analysis done.
Kami Huyse | Homepage | 11.06.07 - 8:06 am | #

That's right. In a project together with Daimler we're trying to do so. Therefor we are using an internal blog where we publish short abstracts of blog posts. The Categories are describing the tonality and should help to organize it in the end. Hopefully - we've just started...

In our case it's a research project. I'm not sure if a customer of an PR agency would pay a service like this.
Thomas Pleil | Homepage | 11.06.07 - 11:07 am | #

Kami,

Here are my thoughts.

You can measure a social media campaign only after you determine the objective for the social media campaign. Influence and interaction and results are the ways in which a social media campaign can be measured. Each has quantitative and qualitative elements. Below are my initial thoughts on this subject. Please bear in mind that there are probably more to add to each category. (Help, advice, and collaboration is appreciated)

INFLUENCE
Quantitative - 1. the number of people in the network 2. the number of networks/social communities/platforms 3. the growth rate of your network

Qualitative - 1. who is in the network? 2. what is the motivation for people joining the network? 3. what ideas are discussed in the networks


INTERACTION
Quantitative - 1. the number of communication methods within a platform 2. the number of scheduled tasks(eg. messages, replies, comments, bulletins, blogs, etc)

Qualitative - 1. the types of communication being sent out 2. who are you targeting with a particular message?

RESULTS
Quantitative - 1. number of leads generated 2. number of sales generated 3. number of new contacts made 4. revenue generated

Qualitative - 1. types of leads generated 2. types of contacts made

Also, I welcome your expertise and participation on inSocialMedia.com

Respectfully,

Nelson Bruton
Nelson Bruton | Homepage | 05.20.08 - 9:44 pm | #