Social Media: What's the Magic Metric?

(Our guest blogger is Oliver Bandte, President of Analyx, the Sponsor of the MIT Enterprise Forum virtual masterclass with Chris Brogan on April 5, 2010. Topic was TRUST- 6 Key Actions to Leverage Your Most Valuable Currency in Business & Life. It’s based on Chris Brogan’s recently released New York Times/Wall Street Journal bestselling book Trust Agents.)

First of all, a big THANK YOU to Antonio Faillace for founding AuthorsGlobe and the staff for putting together a terrific platform. I think you guys were really great at pulling off this unique online experience and community of forward thinkers and practitioners.

Also, a big thank you to Greg Wymer for his awesome job hosting as well as the MIT Enterprise Forum for the stewardship and guidance they provide to so many entrepreneurs through their various terrific programs (like today’s Virtual MasterClass with Chris Brogan). You are a wonderful community resource.

Last but not least, a big thank you to Chris Brogan for his continuing contributions on how to work with social media, rather than against it. Today’s presentation was an excellent example of his ability to outline the key aspects of social media and how to approach it.

It’s Still a People Business

My key take-away from today’s class is that business is still done between people. Even if we are thinking of ourselves as living in a B2B world, we communicate with people, we teach people, we help people, and we sell to people. That these people are also working for companies is almost secondary.

It was very inspiring to hear Chris talk about the use of social media for any size of business. As a smaller, more entrepreneurial company, we sometimes don’t feel we have the resources to always be present on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. Large corporations just have bigger marketing budgets. However, I think for us, it simply becomes a question of a shift in mindset to connect to our potential clients, not as a business, but as people.

The Magic Metric

It was also very refreshing to hear Chris say that there is no new magic metric or whatever to measure social media or the impact thereof. It still comes down to dollars and cents. Seems to be different from what some people in the social media community are saying. This is why Chris is having such success in the business world. He is able to bring this complex and sometimes scary topic back down to levels that people understand.

Here is Chris answering my question in the masterclass: “Which measurement approaches are you aware of that help companies evaluate the benefit of social media on their marketing campaign effectiveness?”

What do you think of what Chris says? What metrics are you using successfully?

Again thank you to all who made this possible. Very exciting and very inspiring.