Here are 10 great ideas on social media measurement and monitoring from Third Tuesday:

1. Ideas can move through social media, leaving a trail of digital breadcrumbs behind.
2. Transparency is a necessity.
3. Through monitoring and listening, treat social media like a customer service line,  engage customers when they are discussing your Organization/Brand.
4. Customer to customer conversations are more important than influencer to customer conversations or business to customer conversations.
5. Listen to types and tonality of conversations and change your behaviour accordingly. Indentify what people dislike and what are your mistakes, then stop doing those things.
6. Your Brand is the sum of conversations.
7. Sometimes it takes a “pain” event to bring companies to social media measurement/engagement, rather than an “opportunity.”
8. Listen at the point of need to generate sales leads. If conversations are about a need that your service provides, it’s a great opportunity to engage with that person.
9. Use the same measurement scale from the very beginning, benchmark over time.
10. Listen to not only conversations about your Organization, but also your competitors.

All of these ideas were from K.D. Paine and Marcel Lebrun. I knew K.D. Paine would be brilliant, but I was most impressed by Lebrun. Marcel Lebrun is CEO of Radian 6, and before Third Tuesday and Mesh I knew very little about him. He definitely knows his stuff when it comes to measurement and monitoring. If you have the chance to hear him speak on the topic, I definitely recommend it.

So there’s a quick look at some great ideas from Third Tuesday. I plan on writing about many of them in the future, in greater detail with my own thoughts on these ideas, plus some more great ideas from Mesh. Stay tuned and thanks for reading!

One key theme we did touch on is the importance of measuring outcomes instead of outputs. In my opinion, this seems to be a recurring theme in PR measurement, and a common problem.

Many PR metrics focus on the quantity of what is produced, and who may or may not see it. For example, how many clips did our press release generate? How many successful pitches did we have? What was the reach of our publicity? These are great to measure within a communication plan, but fail to evaluate the success of a plan.

In the past, Ad Value Equivalencies were a common metric for PR success. How much “free” press did we generate, and how much would that have cost us if it were an ad? Add a few multipliers to beef it up, show it to management, then ask for an increased budget. This has widely been discredited as a flawed measurement system. It doesn’t correlate to any impact on the audience, and eyeballs do not equate to action from targeted stakeholders.

AVEs are a measurement of output. To me, it’s basically a measurement of what the PR staff has been up to. It measures what you’re doing, but not how you’re doing. In a sports analogy, you’re measuring the shots taken, not the points on the board.

The trouble is that this type of measurement seems to be returning when it comes to social media. There is a lot of talk about how many hits are generated. How many subscribers are on the corporate blog, how many views did our viral video get, how big is our facebook group? These are convenient metrics, because like AVEs, they are easy to measure. In actuality, they’re not going to measure any success; they will only measure the distribution of your tactics.

Hits, subscribers, friends and tags are all the same as AVEs from a measurement standpoint. They measure dissemination, not change in opinion, impact or action. They measure outputs, not outcomes.

PR needs to be very critical of its own work. If we hope to be effective counselors, we need to demonstrate substantial impact in our audiences, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Measurement should be about improving reputation and/or increasing ROI, rather than tallying eyeballs.