BuzzTart

These are the tools I use every day – I included them in my last newsletter, but here they are again so you don’t need to search your email:

1.  Amplify – this is a new service that lets you share with all your social networks from one interface (incidentally, NewsMaker only shares manually as we want to make sure the right messages are delivered to the right place on your behalf).
2. Compete – measure your performance in terms of hits and popularity, against your rivals.
3. Addictomatic– introduced to me by the media-savvy Gerry McCusker, this is a tool that reveals what’s been said about your brand, all in one screen, in virtual real time.
4. Social Mention – one of my favourites, allows you track any brand or name and have measurement of its “strength, sentiment, passion and reach” – as the name implies, it includes mentions in social media.
5. Alexa – this is not a new tool but it certainly is one of the fastest and more reliable ways to measure your ranking against websites in your region and across the whole world wide web. It also shows you the top keywords people used to find your pages.

PS: NewsMaker will launch its new platform in 2011. We’ll be using Swayve® software (Sway for Influence and VE for visibility engine). As well as PR productivity tools for publishing and distribution, Swayve lets you track and report on the coverage from your media campaigns in both social and traditional media. Register at Swayve to find out more about our release date.

measuring ROI, public relations, social media, social media metrics, social media ROI

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!

measuring ROI, PR metrics, social media metrics