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A social media strategy without metrics is like Thanksgiving dinner without turkey, truly missing a core ingredient. A social media strategy with the wrong metrics serves the turkey with pasta sauce rather than gravy. Sure, it adds flavor, but it completely distracts from the purpose of the meal. Here’s my point – in marketers’ rush to prove that social media investments produce the required ROI, our social media plans trumpet metrics that may have little relation to what we’re actually trying to accomplish.

In delivering the results of our Social Media Maturity Diagnostic to multiple members over the past month, I sense two problems with social media measurement schemes (and trust me, some are more scheme-like than your local bank heist):

1. Many transactional pieces of social media are incredibly easy to measure – number of followers, Facebook friends, blog posts, and on the list goes. This pulls social media novices into a volume metrics vortex; we become so fixated on sheer numbers that we lose sight of the higher-order objectives that made us think social media was a good idea in the first place.

2. There is incredible senior-level pressure to make every marketing dollar count given today’s economy. Certainly, most social media channels have lower per eyeball costs, but so far, marketers are relatively poor at demonstrably connecting those eyeballs to financial results.

These two elements – transactional metrics and financial outcomes – are actually two ends of a broader measurement spectrum. At this early stage of social media adoption, ROI is a fanciful goal but may only show failure if we cross the chasm too soon. We need a bridge to get us there, and that bridge is a return-on-objectives approach.

Return-on-objectives enables us to work backward from required financial outcomes to select the right set of day-to-day social media metrics. Sitting in the middle are behavioral objectives and attitudinal objectives – mainstays of any marketing communications initiative. The bridge is thus: identify behavioral and attitudinal objectives that key stakeholders have “pre-agreed” correlate to, and ideally cause, positive financial outcomes. Then, work from those selected objectives to transactional social media metrics. Add water and stir, and you have the right gravy for your social media Thanksgiving.  And trust me, it works far better than pasta sauce.

MLC members, learn how to embed social media metrics into your strategy by listening to our teleconference replay here.

Starting in December, we are jumping in to help members learn from each other–we aim to produce a series of case studies on this very topic.  If you believe you might have a good social media metrics case example at hand, please contact lmorris@executiveboard.com

Related posts:

1. Increase the Impact of Your Social Media Experiments
2. Beat the Social Media Investment Catch-22
3. Social Media: The Dangers of Discovery
4. The Social Media Mistake You Don’t Know You’re Making
5. Mass Media, Welcome to Your New Supporting Role (try not to be jealous)