Your “Success” Benchmark is the most important thing to decide on or the ROI ends up being a mystery.
First, decide what you’re measuring. Is it quality of conversations and perceptions of your company? Or is it the numbers: traffic to your Web site, SEO ranking, number of products sold?
To measure quality, such as building better relationships with targeted groups, ask yourself:
- Are we part of what these groups are talking about?
- Are people talking about our company or our competitors?
- Are people referring us to their friends/followers? In Twitter, you can monitor when your brand is mentioned by using Splitweet.com. Hint: this is why Social Media is a good “listening” tool–because you can simply monitor this by viewing conversations; and by using tools like SplitTweet.com that alert you when your brand has been mentioned. Google Alerts are another good way to measure because you get an e-mail alert when someone Googles your name. PeopleBrowsr (My.PeopleBrowsr.com in business mode) can help you monitor your brand and “listen” for positive and negative tweets of which you can set auto-replies that promptly respond to positive and negative comments. (Note: for authenticity’s sake, I would follow up with another response, myself, as soon as possible).
- Are we providing substance and excellent customer service through our responses and conversations?
If you’re measuring quantity: Review your Web site and/or blog’s statistics to see where traffic is coming from. Specifically: check the “referrals” stat. If you don’t have a very good stat program, use Google Analytics. It’s very comprehensive and it’s free. Measuring the quantity is very easy.Your “Success” Benchmark is the most important thing to decide on or the ROI can end up being a mysterious, unknown thing. Not good for business.
