How to measure the impact of social media - checklist

The PR industry continues to look for a reliable way to measure ROI on social media - they know they have to be there but where do all the hours go and was it all worth it?

One clearcut metric is viewer stats (of tweets, video, press releases, diggs, etc) - they are a surefire indicator of the popularity of a topic. But even without a lot of 'thumbs-up' on DIGG.com, you can still get to the top of Google Search for major, 'expensive' keywords. So views on a single website don't tell anything like the whole story.

A large percentage of tweets (more than 60%) contain brand names so you can also begin to measure online reputation and impact: analyse positive, negative and neutral mentions.

Here's a handy checklist from Ogilvy PR that might help you put together an ROI chart:

• Blogs & Microblogs
– Number of inbound links
– Frequency/timeliness of posts
– Foll owers & subscribers
– Number and content of comments
– Affiliation of author
– Search engine visibility
– Traffic
– RSS feed subscriptions

• Videos & Photo Communities
– Number of views and downloads
– Number and content of comments
– Ratings/peer assessment
– Relevant groups
– Number of subscribers
– Number of inbound links

• Message Boards & Forums
– Breadth of boards
– Quantity and timeliness of activity
– Search engine visibility
– Affiliation
– Membership numbers
– Traffic

• Social Networks
– Membership numbers
– Types of community features present
(eg, profiles, blogs, video, message boards)
– Activity level on features
– Affiliation
– Search engine visibility
Hope this helps - let me know what you use to measure success!