Measurement Camp - How to measure social media. My take on the event…

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I was in the big smoke yesterday at the second instalment of the social media measurement camp organised by Will McInnes. Both Seb and Stuart attended the Chinwag event on measuring social media that inspired Will to set up the camp and have posted about it previously but I thought I would give you my thoughts on this one, especially as it’s one of the first events I’ve been to whilst working in the PR industry.

I really enjoyed the set up of the meeting. It was really informal so and we were split up into groups to discuss issues therefore allowing everyone to make contributions to the discussion.

The key thing I came away thinking was that nobody really had any definitive answers about the best way to measure social media. Nielsen had some good examples of the tools that they use to analyse social media campaigns, however it was clear that these are not necessarily always effective for all the types of social media. Some useful insights into benchmarking by creating snapshots were also shared.

The questions were plentiful and really got me thinking about social media and the practicalities of measuring it. Here are some of the questions that we came up with to get your brains around:

· Should the different types of social media platform be considered as separate media forms? For example should a Twitter campaign be measured in a completely different way to a blogger outreach campaign? My initial thoughts were of course, but then this led to me questioning how you measure a campaign that translates across the different platforms, for example if a YouTube video is uploaded and is then posted on a blog, then added to a group on Facebook?

· From this we started to consider whether the true value of social media is in the story/content rather than where it appears?

· What is the definition of a successful Facebook/MySpace/Twitter campaign?

· How do you identify appropriate mavens and how do you value them (e.g is more people talking more important than influential people talking?)

· How do you measure the effects of your online campaign offline?

One of the key conclusions that I came to after the event is that one of the biggest challenges in measuring social media is defining what makes a campaign successful, especially as this can be specific to each client and to each individual campaign that is created.

I think I definitely have to agree with Stuart and Will again that “understanding is more important than measuring” and that to measure we must understand.