The key with social media measurement, I think, is to stand back and take a widescreen approach to measurement. Rather than focusing on the smaller, campaign-specific metrics, such as traffic from Twitter or the number of fans on Facebook, wouldn’t it be better to look at how it helps to shift the most important business KPIs, such as sales, profits, as well as customer retention and satisfaction rates?

• Driving engagement and interaction.
• The goal of any social optimisation strategy is to provide the right tools so that people can engage with your brand / people / products / services onsite and offsite.
• You want people to make a noise.
• You want people to store and share things.
• You want people to love your website.
• You want people to visit more frequently.
• You want people to refer your company to their friends.
• You want people to buy into your brand.
• You want people to buy your products.

A list of social interaction metrics / KPIs

1. Alerts (register and response rates / by channel / CTR / post click activity)
2. Bookmarks (onsite, offsite)
3. Comments
4. Downloads
5. Email subscriptions
6. Fans (become a fan of something / someone)
7. Favourites (add an item to favourites)
8. Feedback (via the site)
9. Followers (follow something / someone)
10. Forward to a friend
11. Groups (create / join / total number of groups / group activity)
12. Install widget (on a blog page, Facebook, etc)
13. Invite / Refer (a friend)
14. Key page activity (post-activity)
15. Love / Like this (a simpler form of rating something)
16. Messaging (onsite)
17. Personalisation (pages, display, theme)
18. Posts
19. Profile (e.g. update avatar, bio, links, email, customisation, etc)
20. Print page
21. Ratings
22. Registered users (new / total / active / dormant / churn)
23. Report spam / abuse
24. Reviews
25. Settings
26. Social media sharing / participation (activity on key social media sites)
27. Tagging (user-generated metadata)
28. Testimonials
29. Time spent on key pages
30. Time spent on site (by source / by entry page)
31. Total contributors (and % active contributors)
32. Uploads (add an item, e.g. articles, links, images, videos)
33. Views (videos, ads, rich images)
34. Widgets (number of new widgets users / embedded widgets)
35. Wishlists (save an item to wishlist)

Each company may have some specific requirements, but here are ten important social media metrics to measure:

1. Social media leads. Track web traffic breakdowns from all social media sources, and chart the top few sources over time. If members of your social media networks are sending referrals, consider measuring this data as well.

2. Engagement duration. For some companies, engagement duration is more important than page views. For example, if you have a Facebook application, how much time are social network members spending using it? Is per-member usage increasing over time? Alternately, if people visit your your company websites from SM (Social Media) sites, how long are they spending? (Also consider tracking which pages they visit.)

3. Bounce rate. Are visitors coming to your site from SM sites but quickly leaving? Maybe your landing page needs better, more relevant copy. Maybe the information they’re seeking isn’t easily found.

4. Membership increase and active network size. This is the portion of your company’s social networks (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) that actively engages with your social media content (e.g., Twitter, Facebook Pages, etc.) Is your collective members, followers, fans network growing, and is there interaction with your content?

5. Activity ratio. How active is your company’s collective social network? Compare the ratio of active members vs total members, and chart this over time. There’ll always be some social network members who are inactive, but if you initiate a campaign to increase interaction, you should also measure the resulting data. Activity can be measured in a variety of ways, including usage of social applications.

6. Conversions. You want social network members to convert: into subscriptions, sales (direct or through affiliates), Facebook application use, or whatever other offerings you have in your overall sales funnel and that can somehow be directly or indirectly monetized. (E.g., subscription to a weekly e-newsletter can be monetized by giving other companies access to your list in the form of advertising.) Measure all types of conversions and chart them over time.

7. Brand mentions in social media. So, you have a highly active social network and members are talking about your company or the company’s brands. Measure and track both positive and negative mentions, and their quantities.

8. Loyalty. Are social members interacting in the network repeatedly, sharing content and links, mentioning your brands, evangelizing? How many members reshare? How often do they reshare?

9. Virality. Social members might be sharing Twitter tweets and Facebook updates relevant to your company, but is this info being reshared by their networks? How soon afterwards are they resharing? How many FoaFs (Friends of Friends) are resharing your links and content?

10. Blog interaction. This is actually more than one metric lumped together. Blogs ARE part of an SMM (Social Media Marketing) toolkit, but only if you allow comments and interact with readers by responding. If you’re doing this, encourage responses either directly in the comments section of blog posts, or via Twitter. (Use a blog widget that allows this.) If your blog’s content is suitable for social voting (Digg, Propeller, Mixx, etc.) or social bookmarking (Delicious, Stumbleupon) sites, install a blog plugin that displays the necessary sharing “buttons”, then track referrals back from those sites.

Here’s a 30 minute video of his presentation, check it out:

The MySpace homepage has a higher 18-34 composition than any other portal

25% of Americans are on MySpace

40% of all moms in the US are on MySpace.

MySpace is the most trafficked website in the US

12% of all online minutes are spent on MySpace

13.6% of all Internet users in the world are on MySpace

With 15 languages available, MySpace is the most translated social network

MySpace is the place where bands and artists hang out online…over 6 million world wide…to connect with fans and share their music

On average 350,000 new people sign up to MySpace every day

MySpace may be the place for ugly layouts, cripplingly-bad design, and trolls, but it’s also where a lot of people are.

If you are marketing online and you’re ignoring MySpace, you are missing the largest of the boats.

These are the sites that are defining our current state of the Internet, the sites that are responsible for giving every single person in the entire world the opportunity to promote themselves online.

Start using them yourselves, as they are more than means to market and promote things. They will help you share and organize your information, your pictures, movies, and videos. They will help you manage the little things in life.

Once you start using these sites, you’ll learn how they can help you in your marketing and advertising efforts. If you don’t use them and help contribute to their communities, then those communities will never help you…

From the four main types of Social Media, message boards, social networking, blogging and videos, there are various types of interaction a business can have with its customers:

1- Identity-based Interaction is your declaration of your value, who you are, and where you can be found. Your customer falls upon your online identity that you, as a provider, define and declare. Here, there is very little interaction outside of your own declaration, but this becomes critical in defining how you can benefit your marketplace or customers.

Over the past few years we have seen an outcrop of websites created purely for this function. hey act more as an expanded business card, if you will. Most also include the opportunity to link to your other forms of presence online, somewhat bringing together your presence in one place… They include: Naymz, Ziki, ClaimID and my favorite LinkedIn.

2- Association-based Interaction is your customers’ opportunity to associate themselves with you and you with your customer base. Most obviously, this is accomplished through things like becoming “Friends” on MySpace, you and your customers’ BlogRoll, or through their social bookmarking. Just like music fans wearing their favorite band’s t-shirt… A customer (fan) associating himself to the band.

The most explicit form of allowing for this ability is through social bookmarking sites. Make it easy for your customers to bookmark your site, blog posts, etc with their favorite tool such as del.icio.us, Furl, blummy, Ma.gnolia, StumbleUpon and BlinkList.

3- User-initiated Conversation is your users’ and customers’ opportunity to create their own declarations or questions, and your opportunity to respond. This is your opportunity to be there and cater to them. Here is where you serve your customers.

The best examples of this lie in messageboards, forums and “groups” sites such as Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups, community sites, etc. In order to get directly involved with your customers it is your duty as a brand, a company or a musician to find these conversations and participate. Search communities such as Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, AOL Groups, MSN Groups, Topica Email Lists, tribe.net, Ning and Facebook Groups.

4- Provider-initiated Conversation is your chance to find out what your customers think, feel, love and hate about your product. Ask them. Challenge them. Present yourself to them, but do so respectfully. As much as it’s an opportunity for them to tell you what they love and hate about your product, it’s also their choice whether to do so or not. Be kind. Be respectful. Appreciate their time. Find your customers and interact with them at: Myspace, Bebo, Friendster, Help.com, Facebook and more…

5- In-Person Interaction is the pinnacle form of interaction with your customers. You’re interacting with them online and should be in person too. This is where relationships are built and authentic conversation is had with so much more input, feedback, collaboration and communication. Nothing beats face-to-face. Get out there. Meet your customers. Let them interact with other customers. Build your community. Go to conferences…better yet, organize your own gatherings.

To help this along, coordinating, managing attendee status, etc, there have been several sites that can help in either finding local events or coordinating your own: Meetup, BarCamp, Evite, Upcoming and Eventful.

Any and all forms of Social Media Marketing tactics fall under at least one of the above five forms of action. Often the same channel will incorporate two or more of them.