According to Fleet, the reason measuring social media becomes confusing is because, more often than not, marketers fail to create a solid plan. If they start with a plan, develop business objectives, and then find measurable tactics that tie back to the plan, the metrics should be clear.

WebProNews is partnering with BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the world’s first and largest new media conference, in an effort to broadcast how new media can grow your business, brand, and audience. BlogWorld takes place November 3-5 in Los Angeles and includes speakers such as Dave Fleet. Stay tuned to WebProNews for much more exclusive coverage.

In this interview with WebProNews, Dan Zarrella of Hubspot discusses a few of the issues that people are having with social and what they can do about them. For starters, people are always raising questions about measuring social media efforts.

“When you’re talking about social media analytics and measuring social media, it’s really important to be accurate, [and it's] not so important to be precise,” said Zarrella.

For example, most of the tools for getting positive or negative feedback about a brand are 50-60 percent accurate. If you are using one of these tools for specifically fleshing out the bad tweets about your brand, you’re only going to get a little more than half of them. Zarrella calls this form of measuring precision.

With accuracy, on the other hand, he points out that you can look at trends. For instance, if you look at the baseline of positive tweets and the baseline of negative tweets, you can measure increases and decreases.

Also regarding data, Zarrella emphasizes the importance of digging into the data and finding out what it means. There is a group in the social media industry, which he calls the “unicorns and rainbows,” that tend to constantly push engagement, value, quality, and other buzzwords.

While these areas are important, he said that the tactics around them are only based on what feels good. This group doesn’t encourage people to call themselves gurus or experts. However, Zarrella has found that, according to the data, people that do identify themselves as an authority on Twitter have more followers. For this reason, he believes people should get into the data and act on what it implies.

In addition, Zarrella discusses Facebook and how people don’t have to be concerned with the continuous changes as long as they are geting the basics right.

As he explains to WebProNews, if a sales rep makes 100 phone calls and out of those 100 calls gets 16 hits. From those 16 hits, he converts 4 into sales. In this scenario, the company does not look at the phone bill. Instead, it looks at the results. Brogan says this is how social media should be viewed.

The problem is that Internet marketers are accustomed to very measurable data. Most are used to throwing money into Google with the expectation of getting something in return. Brogan says that social, on the other hand, is not simple math.

Time is another difficult area with social media since many companies do not understand how much time it takes. To add to this difficulty, as new social sites pop up almost daily, people feel pressured into embracing them also.

“I think with time management, you just got to keep going for the mindset of what your real goal is,” said Brogan.

Lastly, he tells people to “promote others 12 times as much as you promote your own stuff.” By doing this with newcomers to the space, you have the ability to gain long-term support.

How do you approach these challenging areas of social media?

Jenni Tafoya of comScore says the company’s mission is to “measure the digital world.” To execute that mission, the global leader provides research and information in online audience management, e-commerce, advertising, search, video, and mobile endeavors.

Ultimately, comScore allows its clients to understand and achieve success through their own business. If you would like to find out more about what comScore can do for your business, visit their website.

In many cases, traditional media forms such as television are the easiest option for marketers and advertisers, even if it’s not the best choice. Some may argue that the proper measurement tools are not available, but Erin Hunter of comScore says they do exist. comScore even has a media planning suite for marketers and advertisers that goes beyond traditional measures.

One significant problem with choosing that “easy” form of media is the consumers that could be missed. Many consumers are now fully reliant on the Web. If marketers and advertisers aren’t taking this into consideration, a large part of their demographic is probably being neglected.

What challenges have you encountered in your online efforts? Have you discovered that you were missing out on consumers before you integrated online?

Ultimately, everyone’s goal is to make more money. Depending on what you do, that goal could be met by selling more products, obtaining more subscribers to your newsletter, gaining more advertisers, or any number of reasons. The irony of the issue is that in many cases, you could actually exceed your goal if your plan is properly executed.

Todd points out that 99 percent of the time, internal implementation is the problem since marketers do not calculate the time it takes for the IT department to carry out the campaign. If you are using an agency, a pay-per-click campaign is easier to execute because the client is only responsible for their landing page.

Once your campaign is in proper motion, another issue you cannot leave out is the measurement. Todd says, “The only real measure of success is dollars in the bank.”

You are not showing yourself any favors if you go to the trouble of executing a plan and then fail to measure your progress. How will you know if you’re successful and if you’ve met your goals? How will you know what to change next time to make it work better? The bottom line is that you will not know these answers unless you measure.

ComScore measures the click-through rates based on the total clicks on sponsored search advertisements divided by the total number of searches. ComScore’s statistics show Yahoo saw a five percent increase in click-through rates in the first week, and an increase of nine percent over the second week. Federated Media publisher John Battelle seems excited for Yahoo.

“While still in its early stages, any good news for Panama is good news for Yahoo!… and this early study shows plenty of good news.”

ComScore Senior Vice-President James Lamberti sees a growth in search advertising.
“ComScore data show that the recent introduction of Yahoo!’s new search marketing ranking model is already having a positive impact on the click-through rates for Yahoo’s search advertising”, Lamberti says ComScore will keep an eye on the new ranking model.