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The trouble with measuring social media Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Marketing Sherpa’s ‘chart of the week’ this week highlights the perils of trying to measure social media activity:

Excerpted from Marketing Sherpa’s 2009 Social Media & Marketing PR report, which is based on a comprehensive survey of Marketing Sherpa readers (marketing and PR professionals), the chart shows an almost inverse relationship between how effective tactics are and how accurately they are measured at present.

Not surprisingly, the report ranks “inability to measure ROI” as one of the most significant barriers to social media adoption.

To cope with this anomaly, Marketing Sherpa encourages marketers to:

  • Measure the value of conversations and relationships gathered by social media qualitatively
  • Not focus on moment-in-time transactions such as traffic ‘hits’
  • Don’t obsess about tracking social media results quantitatively - don’t employ less effective social media tactics for the sake of measurability

Achieving branding goals is most effective use of social media, according to the report, while the second most effective use of social media is increasing web traffic. Meanwhile, the most significant barrier to social media adoption, even in the tough economic climate, is not budget, but lack of knowledge.