This past month I got to be on a WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) webinar about how to measure social media analytics. I learned some for the Georgia Aquarium. This was more in-depth and all about analytics. It was hosted by the Spring Creek Group out of Seattle. The presenters were Chad McDaniel and Xavier Jimenez.

I’d say this is one of the best webinars I have been on in a long time. It was really in depth. If you like what you read here and want to see it, they post them on Slideshare.net with audio. I posted this a few weeks back if you want to watch the whole webinar.

Social Medias Scales

• Risk management was the key factor driving social media in 2009 performance optimization will drive 2010
• Fortune 500 and smaller  companies have learned social media, now the middle companies are playing catch up on social media.
• 30-second spot is being replaced by the 30-second review, tweet or post. (Eric Qualman)
• Social media is growing up, and bringing scale to earned media.

Listening is not enough in social media

• It time to move beyond Buzz monitoring – (you can see their social buzz presentation here) understanding how customers are engaging with your brand.
• Where do they need to be assisted and guided more to conversion?
• Find out on your site where people want interaction and start engaging them there.
• Don’t be overly friendly, nothing worse then being smothered.

Data shows the following:

• Social media presence is not limited to a post or tweet
• Presence is distributed across the we and evolves in real time
• This presence can be measured and managed

Spring Creek POV

• Data Driving marketing organization
• Use top shelf tools available – Radiant 6 etc
• Tools are only a small part of the equation
• People and processes, habits and planning are what are actionable.

Actionable analytics – Tools to monitor buzz, test content and track engagement and referrals. Click stream analytics – Java based and just about all the tools listed.

• Google Analytics – (http://www.google.com/analytics)Free site that can add social media as click stream activities. Do planning exercise and take research from active listening programs to see where you should be focusing. A simple way is to configure advanced segmentation to look the url’s from top referring social media sites
• Omniture (http://www.omniture.com/)– Paid site that is most powerful web analytics tools. Has taken some of the stuff Google analytics has done and made it operational. Youhave to be very familiar with Omniture to put the social media tools on the dashboards and alerts.
• Bit.ly (http://bit.ly) – A Free URL shortner – take a long link and make it short. Use with Google Analytics and seeing how it impacts you business. Use customizable url shortening to organize your analytics in Google Analytics or Omniture.
• Get Clicky (http://getclicky.com/)- Both paid and free – it automates tracks visitors across a site,. It shows you engagement, clicks on pages and has integrated twitter or URL Shortener. Has an official WordPress plug in that makes it easier to implement.
• Optify -(http://www.optify.net) Paid – Great source of info on B2B sites. Optimal for folks for people trying to generate leads or fill out forms. Sales Force plug in. It can also create and manage twitter campaigns.

The one thing you want to do is set up S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and Timely Metrics) content testing .This includes:

• Research – Deploy active listening tools to understand the hearts and minds of your customers, clients or guests
• Hypothesize – extract insights from results
• Track – Employ web analytics best practices
• Test – Develop Metrics and KPI’s
• Re-test/optimize – Lear from your results and evolve

I learned something awesome, a way to judge which blogs have the most impact on our brand. It’s the Engagement rate, which is – Posts/comments = engagement rate As you see you get the number of posts that mention your brand then divide by the number of comments. That will tell you how engaged the readers are with your brand. The ways to get info about a blog are not just the engagement rate. You can also use compete.com and comscore to judge user info for a blog and get some demographics.

These are some great tools to get started on finding out your analytics on Social Media.