| social media measurement |
| in the blogsophere, links are currency, and part of brand-building campaigns to generate that external awareness one needs to clinch a sale |
| This posting begins a series about social media measurement outlining, the good, bad and ugly. |
Assessment of blogs or social marketing efforts are important for many different reasons. For marketing professionals, metrics of a blog can provide value feedback about where their blog stands and the progress that were made reaching the targeted audience(s).For advertisers seeking to decide where to place online ads, such metrics can simplify the task of wading through hundreds of blogs and web sites to identify a subset of possiblities.
For managers, these metrics may influence upcoming budgets or result in the shifting of scarce resources to another activity.
For investors or an entrepreneur, these metrics help identify how well the company is doing when it comes to use new media to spread its message and convince others about the quality of its work or services.
For legislative bodies and boards of directors, measures of blog or social media metrics provide a means of documenting performance, ensuring accountability, and evaluating the return on their online marketing efforts.
What is there to measure?
The simplest metrics are such things as impression counts or numbers of unique users, or average number of visits per month.Unfortunately, such metrics may become meaningless when one focuses on sales. Hence, at the end of the day, if one’s cash register does not ring, one has more to worry about than impression counts ….. how to pay the rent, salaries and the piper.
Also as an SME, brand recognition is likely not in the cards. So the biggest potential audience is also the one that companies ignore most often. This audience segment is made up of people who know little or nothing about your company. These individuals are likely to have ended up on your web site or blog through being served up your site or story when getting served their search results at a place such as Google or Technorati (grand central station for blog content).
What brings people to your site is if they searched for an answer to a particular issue (rarely if ever do they type a question but a string of a few keywords is more like it). Hence, indicators, such as Click on link below – choose the option – Login as guest – click on the link again and you get the defintion – fast and easy
may have to be considered. Why, because they could affect how high your site’s content may rank when a user searching on Google is giving the results of her search. We all know being in the top 6 is probably better than on the third page somewhere.
What does it not tell us?
While unique visitors may not tell the whole story and Google PagRank and Technorati Authority may be important indicators, the latter two also have their limitations.
For instance, while most people understand Google PageRank intuitively, the algorithm is not understood by many. And event then, the exact ways and means Google uses are not public knowledge. In fact, a site that ranks lawyers and won a law suit recently in the U.S., uses Google’s rational to justify its own lack of transparency when it comes to rankings published about lawyers. Avvo.com does neither publish exactly and transparently what information they try to rank, nor do they explain succinctly how they do it. See more details here:
Of course, bloggers are a smart bunch of people it seems and they do know how to boost the Technorati Authority score as well. For instance, a person may launch a :
Click on link below – choose the option – Login as guest – click on the link again and you get the defintion – fast and easy
Douglas Karr – metrics – boost – Technorati Authority – free advice offer
McBilly – metrics – boost – Technorati Authority – give-away contest
Both, Douglass Karr and McBilly used a clever way to raise readers’ interest, while getting more links to their post from other blogs. In turn, this raised their Technorati Authority score.
Before we forget, of course, backlinks to one’s blog from other blogs also help with the Google PageRank one’s web site or blog achieves. However, this will take some time to trickle through to your Google PageRank and, as well, the impact may be negligible. But more about this in an upcoming post about backlinks and traffic.
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Also of interest:
– global MBA rankings from the Financial Times – but do we need them?
check out the follow-up to this story
– 2 sensible metrics – a framework for measuring blog success
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