social media measurement

I’m quoted in this Finance and Commerce piece on social media measurement: Beyond guesswork: Companies work to measure the impact of social media

…But even despite the lack of an industry standard, experts say businesses engaging in social media must begin to measure and monitor their efforts even if they are at first measuring against themselves.

“What I say is benchmark today,” said Greg Swan, digital group manager at public relations firm Weber Shandwick. “For some of our clients for whom we have been measuring different social media impressions for years now, at this point we have a really good benchmark.”…

A company that has a manual sentiment analysis system to help clients measure and monitor social media is Weber Shandwick. Swan, at the company’s Bloomington office, said that the company’s Digital Media Scorecard can analyze the volume, content and sentiment of online conversations about a company or brand and then assign a numeric value to it.

“Software can calculate the number of comments on a post, but it takes a human to analyze the sentiment,” Swan said.

In fact, the lack of a gold standard in terms of measurement may force companies to set some parameters themselves instead of trying to live up to a standard, especially since most don’t expect a standard to emerge, now or ever.

So, for a business-to-business company, a few hundred views of a video that marketers put on YouTube may be a success. For a consumer-facing company that might be in the tens of thousands, Swan said. Thus, the onus of defining those objectives falls on businesses themselves.

Monty of Ford echoed Swan…

Read the entire piece here.