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Social Media: How Do You Measure Success?

I’ve been thinking about the best way to determine a company’s success in the Social Media. I don’t think that there is a one-size-fits-all answer, nor am I sure if we yet know to tie a lot of the activity we do in the Social Media directly to sales, customer retention, and other bottom-line business goals. However, I think that there are some Social Media measurements that give us much better insight into things like impact and engagement than most advertising and marketing measurements do.

I’ve been participating in an intensive training program from the Social Media Academy where the NPC Model is taught (Network-Participation-Contribution). It is a good start, and simple enough to measure with some of the better Social Media Analytic tools.

Network: Number of connections and followers
Contribution: Blog posts, video clips, events, knowledge posts, LinkedIn, Facebook, SlideShare, etc.
Participation: Comment on blogs and other contributions. Counting views on places like Digg, Delicious, SlideShare, etc.

This approach recognizes many of the ways that you can communicate and engage with people. The Network includes all of the active Participants, the Contributors that respond to the active Participants, and the rest of the people – the largest group – that read and are influenced by what everyone else is saying.

However, as a homework exercise, a group of us did an Assessment of a company and – as I got to the section about making recommendations about what they should do in the Social Media and creating some benchmarks for measurement – the NCP Model was not complete enough.

I wanted to know, specifically, if the company could increase the positively-connated posts of influencers by being more engaged with them. I wanted to know if the topics of conversation changed in specific areas (e.g., would a series of good instructional videos on YouTube reduce the number of complaints about how confusing this company’s product is?). Would the overall sentiment in the blogosphere become more favorable? Would the positive buzz start to outstrip that of its competition?

Don’t get me wrong, I think that tracking the number of different kinds of events gives a good indication of level of engagement. However, wherever possible, looking for qualitative evidence of how the conversations have shifted is even better. The beauty of Web 2.0 over Web 1.0 is you can get far beyond page views and unique site visitors. The relationship with your customers and prospects changes when they are not just numbers. And they also like you better when you come outside of your company walls and talk with them.