Defining Social Marketing Analytics

Social Marketing Analytics is the process of measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions between brands and consumers and/or businesses across digital channels in the context of specific goals and objectives.

…At least that’s our working definition. Analytics Demystified and the Altimeter Group are collaborating on a white paper on the topic of Social Media Measurement and we need your help. Our goals for this endeavor are to offer a framework for quantifying the efforts of your social marketing activities and to provide some best practices in measuring social media. Our approach is to bring together social media strategy from the Altimeter Group and analytics discipline from Analytics Demystified to illustrate how organizations can truly justify social media marketing. This paper will be available in March 2010 to all at no cost as we believe that practitioners and organizations shouldn’t have to pay for quality research.

So, now that you know the backstory… While conducting research for this paper, we quickly realized that social media means so many different things to different people that a clear definition was necessary. Under the concept of open research, we’re looking to you to help us crowd source a definition for what we call Social Marketing Analytics. We offer a starting point for the definition here and challenge all you vendors, social media mavens, gurus, users, abusers and everyday practitioners to help us refine the definition.

As you help us shape this definition, please keep in mind the following:

• Social Marketing Analytics is a method for businesses to understand the results of their social marketing efforts – it’s not meant for consumers.

• The definition must include all social channels – those in existence today and ones that will exist in the future.

• We’re taking a big-picture approach by starting with a strategy for social marketing that isn’t dependent on specific channels or technologies.

So here’s our working definition. Please post your comments below or reach out to us via email or Twitter to help define a common starting point for measuring this incredibly important piece of our connected universe.

“Social Marketing Analytics is the process of measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions between brands and consumers and/or businesses across digital channels in the context of specific goals and objectives.”

Now make it yours… Please comment!