Connie Bensen has a great post on Social Media Measurement. Some of the content is based on a Jeremiah Owyang webinar from back in January, but Connie extends the concepts from that webinar to be a really practical guide for developing a monthly report. It’s a guide that is applicable beyond social media measurement with just a little bit of tweaking.

Some of the key points in Connie’s post — Frankensteined together into a short bulleted list:

• Web analytics is one source of measures, but there are scads of others: del.icio.us, Magnolia, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Pownce, Digg, Technorati, Techmeme, Facebook/Yahoo!/Google groups
• A monthly report should reiterate objectives (which I interpret to mean: “go beyond tables of numbers”)
• If you truly engage with your community, then you may actually discover some things you should be measuring that you were not initially aware of
• There are a lot of things you can measure (editorial aside: just because you can measure it doesn’t mean you should measure it — cast a broad net when thinking about what you can measure, but then only measure what really matters)
• Recommendations (recommendations, recommendations!) — forcing yourself to include recommendations with the report is a great way to answer the question, “Is this information actionable…or is it merely interesting?” It is also a great way to get the recipients of the report engaged with the information

Much of Connie’s post lays out common sense tips for effective measurement. Why, then, do we so often ignore major components of her framework? My answer: because, when we think about measurement, we think about quantitative data. That gets us into an analytical mindset, and we start to see measurement simply as an engineering problem: capturing the data and then automating the reporting of it. Unfortunately, that’s the easy part — nailing down what the right data is, and reporting it in a way that makes it truly actionable often requires active exertion on an on-going basis.

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