How Do You Measure Up?

Social media use can be measured and there are a number of free and paid measurement tools available to help you do this. With so many tools, which one do you use? Do you use a combination? Can paid tools uncover richer insights for you than the free tools? Both free and paid analytic tools only collect data for you and may offer proprietary programs that help you measure it, but PR practitioners, knowing their business objectives, would ultimately have to put those metrics into perspective to make sense against the business objectives. 

Given that today’s economy is an information economy, organizations are clamouring for the best possible data to provide them the best possible insights on social web use, knowing that this valuable information will help them innovate and edge out the competition. But the possibilities of what data to track is virtually endless and there is currently no single, right formula offered in the marketplace to help PR practitioners put it all in perspective or give a clear understanding that correlates the right data to the right insights for a given organization. In considering what tools to use, PR practitioners need to keep abreast of the tools that are available and understand what data they can deliver and the tools they can offer to help make sense of the data to their business objectives.

In the realm of the free social web analytic tools available, some are specific to a given platform, like TweetStats and Twitter Analyzer, and some collect data from across platforms, like Social Mention. Blogs can be measured as well, through tools like CoComment. Here is a great blog post, called The Best Free Social Media Tracking Tools You Should Know About, that serves as one guide to some of the free tools out there and what they can do for you: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/02/18/social-media-tools/

Some of these free tools also have a paid counterpart. Trackur is one of these tools. At approx. $18 month, it is one of the cheapest paid tools available. Trackur scans the web across millions of web pages, including blogs, videos, images and forums. At the other end of the paid spectrum are likely Sysomos and Radian6, two leaders in the social web analytic realm.

As companies are increasingly looking to PR practitioners to provide ROI information, the question is not whether to track or not - using social web analytic tools to identify organizational strengths and weaknesses, and the overall organization’s reputation, makes business sense. With so many options available, however, what you choose as your tool or tools of choice comes down to your budget and the number of PR practitioners in a given organization allocated to delving into the multitudes of data to apply insights.