This post appeared recently on the eminently snarky and cynical website Overheard in the Newsroom: "Social media editor: “I’m too busy. I can’t use my brain.”
If your organization has leapt into social media, the people responsible for that may well feel that way. But it's something they have to do every day, because a day online is like a month (or more) in more traditional marketing.
It's also important to take the time to analyze your social media's effectiveness - if for no other reason than to justify your efforts. Just make sure you use meaningful metrics, and understand what those metrics can and cannot say about their success.
For example, if you or others at your group blog, notes Galen De Young at ProteusB2B, business bloggers need to look beyond metrics such as numbers of visitors or RSS subscribers.
"In my opinion, one of the best ways to gauge the success of a B2B blog is to analyze how much traffic it’s generating, and to analyze how hard those blog pages are working for you," De Young writes.
Those measurements include how people found your site, where people land on your site and how much time they spend there, he notes.
At Hammock, we call that a Content Marketing Intelligence Report or CMIR, and it's what we do for every client at the start of a relationship and at regular intervals thereafter. That's how we measure up.
