Evaluating social media: impossible and pointless?

I'm speaking at a conference on social media about how charities can measure and evaluate social media activity.

The first bit is relatively straight-forward: there are lots of free tools which can help you measure activity. I'll point to some of them later on.

The difficult bit is evaluating that activity, particularly if you're a hard-pressed charity with scarce resources.

A journalist I know quoted a social media expert to me last week. "Basically, he said trying to evaluate social media activity is both impossible and pointless. Does that help?".  Well, yes and no, thanks Sam. 

It's only pointless if you just measure activity because that doesn't tell you anything meaningful on its own.  You might have inadvertently created a firestorm on Twitter that generates thousands of tweets.  It'll get your numbers up - but perhaps not in the way your Board expected. 

Or you might not get a huge response, but you still engage with the people you were trying to reach.  So that's a success, albeit not on a grand scale.

Just as the PR industry has moved away from using AVEs to evaluate activity, so we must think harder about what success looks like in social media terms.  So pointless, no.  Difficult, yes, but not, I think, impossible.

What probably is impossible is to know everything that's been said, recommended, blogged or tweeted about your charity and its activities and issues day and night.  So think carefully about how much time you can and will devote to finding out, and make it proportionate to your needs and levels of social media activity.  It is very easy to disappear down the Twitter rabbit hole only to emerge, several hours later, in need of a stronger prescription from your optician...

I have to make a confession here: I'm no social media expert, I'm learning about this as I go along - from trying it, and from other people who seem to know what they're doing.

The key, as I see it, is not so far from evaluating the outcome of other communications activities.
- be absolutely clear, when you set your objectives, how you're going to measure and evaluate your success.  If you can't say how you'll do it, they're the wrong objectives
- plan an integrated campaign in which social media activity plays a part
- know who your audience is, where they are, what motivates them
- know what success looks like - go beyond numbers of 'likes' 'friends' 'tweets' and so on. Is it new members, supporters, people getting involved in a forum or campaign on your website or elsewhere?
- decide which tools you'll use to measure activity
- know how you'll analyse the results
- evaluate and learn for the next time, and most importantly
- keep it up.  It takes seconds to tweet, but Rome wasn't built in a day and neither is an online network.

Now for those tools - it's not an exhaustive list, but a good place to start:

google alerts, socialmention.com - let you know when you're being talked about
twitter search: use Tweetdeck to see who's saying what
tweetreach: see how far your tweets have gone
google analytics: see traffic levels, sources, key phrases for your site
howsociable: measure the visibility of your charity on the web. Useful for comparisons with other charities too.
alexa; estimate of reach, rank, page views and visitor information for your site. Track over time.
Bit.ly: shorten and share links, then see what people do with them. I love it.
Blog comments: how many, what content, how influential.

So here are my thoughts so far. What do you think?