For the last few years, the hottest debates in social media have centered around metrics, and how to prove the value of your activities. Two years ago, we were debating whether or not we should even bother trying to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of our social media activities. Some people argued it was impossible, others that ROI wasn’t the point.

We’ve come a long way in the last two years, and people like Katie Paine, Keith Burtis, Olivier Blanchard and Christopher S. Penn have shown us not only that we can measure the value of our social media activities, but how.

Even so, as with many business buzzwords, there’s still some confusion about what we mean when we use the terms listening, monitoring, measurement, analytics and ROI. Some people, I fear, use them more or less interchangeably. At the MarketingProfs B2B Summit in Boston two weeks ago, ROI was a pervasive topic. I was asked to contribute two imperatives to a list of 10 that would be presented at the final session. One of mine was, “Understand the difference between monitoring, measurement, analytics and ROI.”

(Two things: I’ve since added “listening” to the list of terms, so there’s a bonus for you, dear reader. Second, as an English major, I have a niggling doubt that, grammatically, it should be “Understand the differences among…” But I’ve been in marketing for 20 years, so I’ve learned to quash any qualms about mangling the mother tongue. Extensible. Actionable. Feature-rich. Cross-platform.)

Listening

Listening is the first step in the ladder. I think of listening in social media as the process of learning what people are saying about you and where. People and companies may use free tools like Google and Bing, Twitter search and Google Blog Search to find mentions of themselves, their companies, competitors and topics of interest. If you’re just looking for information, setting up free listening tools may be enough for you. The danger lies in allowing your listening to be passive and inconsistent; especially if your company doesn’t get a high volume of mentions, you might miss the one you most needed to see.

Monitoring

I see monitoring as one step beyond listening. Monitoring adds the 24/7 component to listening and attempts to make sure you capture all relevant mentions. There are free tools like Google Alerts that can help, as well as any number of paid tools that feature monitoring as an essential component. Monitoring solutions can also include alerting as a key function; if something happens at 3:00 a.m. or while you’re on vacation, how are you going to find out about it?

Measurement

Measurement is the first step toward integrating the results of your social media activities into your larger business processes. In my experience, companies set up listening and monitoring first, then inevitably someone wants to know, “How are we doing?” Are we improving, are we ahead of our competitors, are we doing enough? In order to be able to quantify (and justify) your social media activities, you need measurement. That can be as simple as establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) and benchmarks that are relevant to your business. Are we getting more comments on our blog than this time last year? How quickly are we adding Twitter followers?

The danger here comes in getting stalled at this stage and seeing measurement and KPIs as an end in themselves. So, 10,000 people have liked your Facebook page. But what good is that? This leads us to…

Analytics

How are your social media activities supporting your bottom-line business objectives? Does having 20,000 Twitter followers translate into more awareness, more leads, more sales? What’s the value of a Facebook fan? These are not easy questions to answer, despite what some might lead you to believe. Understanding the analytics of your social media activities is no different than understanding the value of your PR or marketing activities; you have to do the hard work to tie your activities to conversions, whatever that means for your business. Then you can see how your social media metrics tie to your business goals. In other words…

ROI

Frankly, I got tired of the ROI debate a long time ago. For the people I’ve had to influence in my career, ROI has only ever meant one thing: how much we spent compared to how much we made. It’s no different in social media. ROI in social media is thorny, in part because some people expect it should be easy to track because it’s online. You can, but only if you do the work of building the connections. That’s why lots of smart marketers are having more luck tracking the ROI of campaigns, rather than their social media activities as a whole.

Suppose, for instance, you wanted to increase attendance at your next event and use social media to help. You could tweet about it, create a Facebook event and write about it on your blog and in your LinkedIn group. But how will you know if anyone signed up as a result? Create a landing page where people can sign up for the event. Create a shortened link to the page. Add a call to action to all your social media mentions driving traffic to that site. Your web analytics will tell you how many people came to that page from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. From that point, calculating the ROI of that campaign is a matter of understanding how much time you spent creating it, how much you increased attendance as a result of the campaign, what the dollar value was of the increase, and how that compares to the value of your time spent creating the campaign.

Trivial? No. Easy? Not necessarily. But in the long run, you’ll probably spend less time building the process to track your ROI than you would otherwise spend trying to justify why you haven’t.

So, what do you think? Have you mastered the metrics muddle? Please leave your thoughts and comments below. And for more nuts-and-bolts information you can put to use right away, check out our Resource Library.

Tags: Christopher Penn, Facebook, google, Katie Paine, Keith Burtis, Linkedin, Listening, measurement, Olivier Blanchard, roi, Social Media, social media metrics, social media ROI, twitter