The folks over at Geary Interactive tagged me in a post to share 7 things about myself.  Here is how this little online tagging game is being played (from the Geary site):

“The game’s rules state that you: Share 7 facts about yourself in the post; Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs; Let them know they’ve been tagged.  You should also include the person who tagged you in the post.”

I’m actually happy I was tagged to share 7 things about myself because I realized that you folks probably don’t know much about me.  So here it goes:

1)  I was originally born in Melbourne, Australia, am from Georgian decent, live in the United States, and am fluent in Russian.

2)  I played soccer for around 12 years of my life and was actually pretty darn good at it.  While in college at UCSC I played for the school soccer team, racquetball team, ultimate team, and was a member of the chess club (you already know I love chess right?)

3)  I worked for my first startup right after college and hated it because I was doing mindless drone work and was often tasked with bringing coffee to executives and management, something I definitely did not sign up for.

4)  I wasn’t a good high school or community college student yet when I attended UCSC I graduated with honors and a dual degree in Business Management Economics and Psychology.

5) I absolutely love dogs, probably more than I should.  I’m the guy that wants to go to a dog shelter and take all the dogs home, I can always find homes for them later

6)  I’m a bit of a health nut.  I watch what I eat and workout on a regular basis.  That being said I love In & Out, I’m sure you can see my dilemma?

7)  My family lives in LA: mom, dad, 16 year old brother, and lovely dog.  I see them a couple times a year and usually spend all major holidays with them.

Hope you enjoyed these random 7 tidbits about me

Now here are the 7 people that I tag to share 7 random things about themselves:

Josh Peters

Danny Brown

Tyler Willis

Justin Goldsborough

Allen Stern

Christopher Peri

Greg Verdino

Thanks for reading!

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If you want to be able to track the success of a social media campaign (and for that matter any online marketing campaign) you have to benchmark and measure against something.  If you want to start a social media campaign tomorrow then you need to make sure you have the tools and metrics to measure, today.  You can’t just use a tool that gives you a snapshot of your overall social media presence, you need something with numbers that you can compare and benchmark against.  This is what corporations and executives are looking for.

Keep in mind that there plenty of other things to measure that don’t have a specific quantifiable number, however the focus of this post is just on quantifiable metrics and the tools to measure those metrics.

First thing’s first, outline all of your goals and expectations and make sure you understand them.  Once you have that down you can open up an excel spreadsheet and start benchmarking.  I want to make this THE resource for tools on social media measurement so if you contribute in the comments section I will most likely add your suggestion to the main post.

Please structure your comment in the way I have outline below, give me the tool you are going to use and the metrics that you should measure with that tool.

Let’s get right into the tools we need to measure social media success, shall we?

The Tool

Google Analytics

This is an absolute must.  Google analytics will allow you to track your traffic levels (among other things) and will allow to identify where you traffic is coming from.

What you should measure

• overall traffic increases
• where your traffic is coming from, i.e. digg, twitter, etc.
• most trafficked keyterms or phrases (if this is something you are interested in)

The Tool

Feedburner

Feed burner allows you (and your visitors) to subscibe to your blog via RSS or email.

What you should measure

• RSS subscribers
  
• Email subscribers

The Tool

Blog comments

Pretty self explanatory, these are just the comments/feedback users leave on your site

What you should measure

• Amount of comments (don’t count spam or non-quality comments)

The Tool

Twitter Search / Tweetbeep

Twitter search allows you to search for keywords or phrases in real time, tweetbeep sends you alerts when someone mentions your particular keyword/phrase/product/etc.

What you should measure

• How many times your product/company/article/etc. is mentioned, again track this over time so that you can see progress.

The Tool

Google Alerts

Similar to tweetbeep mentioned above, Google alerts gives you email notifications when someone mentions a particular keyword or phrases.   Here is how to use google alerts.

What you should measure

• How many times your product/company/etc. is mentioned daily, weekly, monthly.  Yes, you also trend this over time to see progress.

The Tool

Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo site explorer is a tool created by Yahoo that allows you to track links.

What you should measure

• The amount of incoming links you receive over time.   This needs to be trended and again you can make correlations between social media efforts and the amount of incoming links to your site.
• Make sure you exclude your domain from the results (you can select this)
  

The Tool

Backtype

Backtype allows you to search comments across the net for particular mentions/keywords.  You can also set up an alert so that you are notified everytime uses your target word in a comment.

What you should measure

• How many times your company/product is mentioned online in comments (can also use Google Alerts to help)
  
• Sentiment of the comment; negative, positive, neutral

The Tool

Tweetburner

Tweetburner allows you to track how many times people click on the links you share via twitter.

What you should measure

• How many times people are clicking on the links you send out via twitter
• Keep in mind most popular categories/types of links people click on the most
• Keep in mind overall how active your twitter followers are with your content

The Tool

Delicious

Delicious is bookmarking utility that let’s you share, organize, and save your bookmarks across the web

What you should measure

• How many times people bookmark your content, you can see this by searching for keywords/phrases that will then return relevant bookmarks, trend overtime.

The Tool

Keyword rank checker

Checks rankings for a domain for a particular set of keywords or phrases.  I didn’t recommend a specific tool because there are too many out there,  just google “free keyword rank checker.”  If you’re using firefox you can use the keyword ranking extension, it does a pretty good job.

What you should measure

Progress and rankings for your particular keywords or phrases.  I would recommend checking this bi weekly or even monthly.

There are a lot of other tools out there but the ones I have outlined above should cover you across very channels.  Keep in mind there are a lot of other things you need to consider as a part of social media success that aren’t as easy to measure:

• number of leads
• knowledge you gain from interacting with your users that can influence product/marketing
• positive brand image

Have another tool and metric to measure?  Let me know and I will include it.  Did you find this post valuable?

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Today there was an article on Gizmodo talking about how Microsoft knew their XBOX 360 was scratching disks, yet they did nothing about it.  Here’s a snippet of the article that sums up everything:

“The solutions considered—and rejected—were to increase the magnetic field of the disc holder (could’ve interfered with the disc opening and closing), slowing the disc speed (could’ve increased load time) and to install small bumpers (too expensive, costing between $35 million and $75 million). Instead, they went with a warning in the manual not to move the console with the discs still inside, a warning that Microsoft itself thought was insufficient, according to an internal email. A consultant for the plaintiff notes that Sony and Nintendo “almost always incorporate the possibility that a console could be moved while a disc is rotating inside in the designs of their products.”

Microsoft took the easy way out and basically gave their customers the finger instead of trying to find a solution to the problem.  As a business you can’t take the easy way out when it comes to quality and user experience, you just can’t.  If your product is scratching disks, skipping songs, deleting files, or freezing up then you need to do something about it before you release it.  Sticking a warning label or “do not” clause isn’t going to work.

Now, at a time where every user and consumer is the media, you can’t afford to slip up.  Microsoft is now in the middle of a lawsuit and I bet other XBOX 360 users are going to jump on the band wagon.  This is a great example of why taking the quick and easy route isn’t always the best alternative.  Notice how Sony and Nintendo responded?  They already take into account that the system is going to be moved around and they compensate for it.

thoughts on this?

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Marketing Profs published a very interesting post today about 50 social media & marketing predictions for 2009.  You can read the full post on the Marketing Profs site.

Here is my prediction for 2009:

In 2009 we will have more established case studies and metrics of measurement for social media.  Companies will realize that social media is not easy and requires a team of passionate human beings to interact with users.  2009 will also bring about more advertising via social networks, and a strong desire for the integration of SEO and social media.

I’ll stop here before I being writing too much.  Check out the presentation below.

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Today I was reading a post over at emergence marketing talking about influence and it inspired to me to write a post of my own, after all the topic of influence is quite an important one.  I believe, that influence and authority go hand in hand.  The more authority you have on a particular subject the more influence you have over people who are interested in that subject (or product).  In order to understand what influence is, we must first understand what influence is not.

Influence is not:

• about how many followers you have or about how many  connections you have
• about forcing or convincing people to do or buy something

According to the dictionary influence is defined as:

“ the act or power of producing an effect without apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command”

So if I recommend using a particular social media tool or product and 70% of you go try that product or service out, then I have a good amount of influence.  If I recommend something and you tell me that I’m an idiot and should be beaten with bamboo sticks, well then my influence is not so great.  The issue that Francois from emergence marketing has raised is that I may be considered an influencer in some industries yet not for others (or for some companies and yet not others).  Therefore how do you measure influence?  If Barrack Obama told you to try out a social media service would you?  What if he told you to vote a certain way on a particular issue?

Again, I think the issue here has to deal with authority as well as influence.  If you are an authority in a particular field you can influence not only your field but also other fields.  So if Obama was a nobody and told you to try out a social media tool, you probably wouldn’t listen, but as President Elect if he tells you to try out a social media tool, you are much more likely to listen because even though Obama is not a social media authority, he is an authority on politics and government, make sense?

As Shel Israel mentions on his blog, influence is very difficult to measure and is pretty much based on a case by case basis.  I try to establish myself as an influencer and authority by sharing my ideas, tips, and strategies with all of you.  I don’t have as many readers (yet) as Chris Brogan or Techcrunch yet the conversations I have with all of you are not any less valuable here then they are on other mediums.

I think this is a very interesting topic and am curious to hear your responses.

How do you measure influence (or authority?)  What is influence to you?

thanks for reading!

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