Over the past two years that I’ve been working in the ChatteRL&A social media department at Robin Leedy & Associates, I have had many discussions with co-workers and clients about how we can measure the impact of our social media campaigns. Since analytics and media monitoring is one of my main responsibilities, I have also read and considered a number of opinions about this subject from thought leaders in the space. All of the opinions that I have read and the discussions that I have had all seem to come to the same conclusion: social media can be a hard beast to tame. However, this does not mean that social media is impossible to measure; it just means that it’s not measured in the typical ways that we measure, analyze and evaluate ROI for traditional media.

Gauging the impact of new technology is always challenging; it took a long time for brands to agree to a measurement standard for “traditional” media, and, even more so, traditional PR. Most recently, the popularity of DVRs and online media consumption have led to some of these well-worn standards to be re-examined. So, while it may be a complex task, social media professionals are continuously working to develop different ways to make social media evaluation not only easy, but concrete and realistic, with the ultimate goal of  reaching a standard that everyone can agree on.

The first step to figuring out a solution is to determine what about social media makes it challenging to measure. The answer to this question comes down to the basis of what social media is: relationships. And measuring the value of a relationship both online and offline can prove to be very tricky, though we think, not impossible.

Relationships come in all sorts of shapes and sizes in the “real world” and the relationships you develop in the “virtual” social media world are no different. A blogger can have any number of potential relationships. For example:

• Casual – Reader with no community interaction
• Engaged – Blog reader who also actively comments on posts
• Direct – Contact with the blogger via e-mail, telephone, or another form of interpersonal contact
• Social – This is for the individual that may not even be a reader of the blog but who knows the blogger on a personal level. This can also be divided into further sub-categories – “close social”, “casual social”, etc.

Now the question becomes, “how do you measure the value of these types of relationships and further still, how do you figure out a relationships value if it is the same type as another. There are different factors open to consideration, including unique monthly visitors (UMVs), how many other sites link to the specific blog (aka “trackbacks”), level of commenting on a particular post, the level of engagement readers have with a specific post, which can be measured by the frequency and the content of the comments that are left. Still, none of these measurements quantify the value of the relationship itself; they are just qualitative factors that determine the popularity of who the relationship is with, and the influence the blogger has on their other relationships.

Often overlooked is the factor of time, which can affect the value of a relationship. Much like traditional media, each day can prove to be easier for one relationship over another and the next day it can be completely different. Social media also is affected by time because it is constantly changing. When I first started at RL&A, Twitter did not exist and Facebook behaved similar to a web site, with only static information present. Now, Facebook is real time and relationships can occur in this new medium with entirely different ways to measure in Twitter. The point is that the standards we use to measure social media will also have to keep up with constant change, which makes it even more difficult to measure, although not impossible. Stay tuned as we continue to develop this measurement process.