[...] then, that Whitehall Webby yesterday links to this interesting piece about measuring the impact of social media, wondering if it can really be done. The premise of my blog was that there’s too much [...]

1) Is true Social Media Measurement possible?

Yes. If you define this as people connecting to people, you can do longitudinal studies analysing the social networks around the network. If you are in a hosted community platform, you can measure the number of private messages. For argument’s sake, forum posts could fall into this category (but I’m not going to start referring to traditional metrics as we all know them)

2) Even if yes, should we measure?

Depends on the gig, I say. If it’s a work of love and you don’t like measuring things, don’t. If you are a membership officer for a resource-poor membership association and need to provide high level reports to display membership community stuff to your boss who is endlessly defending the cost to the trustees, then of course you do. I’m not talking targets though – I’m sticking to knowing what to measure to give everyone in teh system an idea of where and how it is going…

3) Is there an attribute(s) that never can be measured?

Hmm. Interesting. The meaning of life?

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I like what William said about warm clothing. I’ve been in situations measuring centralised communities with trad indicators, in situations measuring distributed communities with my own widgets (e.g. across facebook, myspace, bebo and more at the same time), but these are all quantitative. Naturally I’ve run surveys etc. too. Bear with me….

But the question that bugs me is the point of it, and the types of people we commune with. Not all people engage with communities by saying something, or commenting about it elsewhere, or other ways we can capture. They digest, think and the net result of that can appear somewhere else (like warm blankets).

I ran a thing called http://www.knowledgeboard.com for some time (not any more). There was a lot of noise etc. but many readers, not commenting, who would sometimes email me backchannel to say keep it up, and they enjoyed it, etc.

We did a call for chapters for our community book about knowledge management (which we gave away and number 2 is on its way), and it was the quiet people who came forward with ideas and offers to work on a group project that offered them no reward other than .. well I don’t know…

My point being, can we consider motivation and personality type in these questions about measurement…?

I like the comments that have been added so far. At Vancity, we launched ChangeEverything.ca a year ago, which is an online social network dealing with issues of change where we do business as a credit union.

We measure all kinds of things to gauge the success of the site. Some of it is obvious (# of registered users, # of unique visitors, time spent on site, # of user generated posts, technorati ranking, rss subscribers); some of it is tangible, but not as easily trackable (earned media, write-ups by bloggers); and some of it only measurable in human terms (real world impact, like when the site created momentum leading to over 4,000 items of warm clothing and bedding donated to the homeless within 48 hours of a snowstorm).

In the end, measurement is vastly important, but in a social realm those measurements cannot always be gleaned from analytics software.

Thanks for the great posts.
William

Instead, community managers should look for something intangible, like connections/relationships that are built. Important questions or connections that are made. Or even, loyal users who WANT to and CONTINUE to engage themselves in the community. Thats how you measure success, yet its probably one of the hardest to measure.

Shhhhhhh! That’s a multi-million dollar secret.

There’s a problem though: Brand managers and CMOs have a short term mindset. Their success is measured in quarters, not years. Social media has an incremental, culmulative effect on awareness, consideration, trial and repeat. You’re not going to see noticable spikes like you might see with an FSI or a sampling effort.

Measurement is only part of the listening activity, though. An essential part of interacting with people through social media is not quantitative, so measurement alone is not sufficient (which is why I prefer analysis to measurement as the more general term).

So, to Curt’s point, it’s an art and a science. And a dessert topping.