An Outlook on Measuring Social Media Marketing By Patrick Rooney, Partner, Zócalo Group View bio

As more brands venture into social media marketing, savvy marketers understand that they can better calibrate their programs to tap into, harness and maximize online activity if they can successfully track program results.

Doing so today isn't clear-cut. But the outlook is promising.

Many marketers are unsure how to measure program results because of confusion about what exactly constitutes social media marketing. So, it's important to understand that today's online programs fall into two categories: (1) "traditional" online marketing and (2) marketing programs that incorporate social media tools — true social media marketing.

The difference between the two is much the same as the difference between advertising and public relations. Traditional online marketing (click-throughs, banner ads) is "paid conversation." Social media marketing (blogs, social networks) is "earned conversation."

Experienced marketers will appreciate the fact that the digital nature of social media makes it far easier to put real numbers to earned conversation than it has ever been to measure earned media. Rather than simply counting how many times a brand was mentioned in print or on air, we can now determine how many real people are clicking on mentions of a brand or are actually discussing a brand online — and ultimately creating digital word-of-mouth.

But that doesn't mean it's simple. The major challenge is that social media is still evolving. With sites like Twitter and Facebook growing rapidly and online features from bookmarking to virtual worlds falling in and out of favor, it can be difficult for marketers to figure out what's working before something new comes along.

Adding to that, today's predominant measurement tools are limited in their ability to track conversation across all social media channels. Most existing tools (such as IceRocket, Radian 6, Buzz Metrics, and Collective Intellect) provide increasingly sophisticated analytics for identifying what people are talking about and tracking the volume of earned conversation around a topic. However, while these metrics are important, they provide only a part of the whole picture.

To truly understand the entire digital footprint of a brand, it is critical to identify and track not just how a brand is talked about and where conversations occur, but also the full three dimensions of a digital footprint: height (penetration and growth of conversational messaging), width (how and where conversations about a brand are being shared), and depth (the tone of voice in natural conversation).

Today, marketers must employ a combination of best-of-breed tools for each channel to provide this comprehensive perspective of online conversations and to effectively evaluate programs. Zócalo Group, for example, currently uses more than 30 tools and metrics to track a brand's digital footprint, with more used to track the offline impact.

But as digital media continues to evolve, we can be certain that digital measurement techniques will keep pace. Soon, as new analytics are developed, far fewer tools will be needed to achieve the broad array of metrics. And as meet-ups, tweet-ups, alternate reality and augmented reality tools cause the boundaries between online and offline to blur, measurement tools will grow in complexity to meet those challenges.

Just as social media has enabled people to share information with each other faster than ever before, tools for measuring social media marketing will enable brands to track consumer engagement faster than ever before — and to quickly change course as needed.

All of that spells a positive outlook for measuring the impact of social media marketing programs. But the biggest impact will be determined by how readily marketers embrace new measurement tools and techniques. And that will determine the future of social media marketing itself.