This is a little follow up post to my predictions for social media in 2009.

People always ask the question “social media sounds good, but how do we measure it?” and there are two parts to monitoring.

1. Business outcomes

When doing social media activty its critical to measure it against ‘real world’ business outcomes like sales, perception, market research, whatever. Without that top level realisation of value, social media is near pointless for organisations.

2. Detailed analytics

Currently you can see how much traffic content generates and where it comes from, which is great, however, someone important might post about you and millions of people see it, that’d be great to know about. And when people Tweet on Twitter about your content, or update their facebook status, this is all indications of good content.

And this is where I’m getting a bit too excited, as some smart Canadians, have built a tool that does all that for you automatically and create a quality score.

They’re called PostRank, and more than anything else I love their approach/philosophy.

PostRank scoring is based on analysis of the “5 Cs” of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking. By collecting interaction metrics in these categories the overall engagement score is calculated and the PostRank value is determined.

Clicks are only one part of the rank, and they actually count clicks as the least valuable type of activity! NICE!

Activities like clicks and page views indicate lower engagement because they’re passive interactions. Clicking a link to read a blog post doesn’t require much work, and you’re not giving anything back except your reading time. It is an intentional act, however, and thus indicates a mild level of interest and engagement. Which may grow after the item is read.

So get over their, start ranking your content, see how it compares to others, and link that back to real business results. Lovely.

I’m just surprised, that these guys have been around since early 2007 and people are still asking about how we measure ‘social media’… Its here, its easy and its well awesome.