New Guidelines for Measuring Social Media Marketing

Evidence-based marketers are hardly alone in wanting to measure the success of campaigns within social media services like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter. But in order to have a successful conversation about tracking results, we need a good set of guidelines and eventually, a common vernacular. This week the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) published their two cents on the subject with their report, “Social Media Metrics Definitions.”

The report was created by the IAB’s User Generated Content & Social Media Committee, which is comprised of more than 150 member companies. Among the committee’s primary activity mesurement recommendations are Return Rate, Interaction Rate, Time Spent, Video Installs and Relevant Actions Taken, which includes polls, invites, comments, quizzes, sweepstakes entries and other activities. For blogs, the committee recommended a different set of metrics related to “Conversation Size,” including relevant in-and-outbound links, references to the original conversation on other sites and monthly visitors.

The report contains one new catchphrase with the potential to become common parlance — “Widgets in the wild.” This apparently refers to the number of widgets on a given page at any point in time. We’re not sure how useful that metric is going to be, but we sure like the way they say it.