10 immutable laws for measuring conversation

Er… so it seems Edelman held an academic social media conference the other week in Chicago.

There is a good round up of some of the topics discussed at the conference live blog, but I like this post from one of the delegates, Karen Miller Russell, who teaches at the University of Georgia, about measuring social media.

Readers of this blog will know that I haven’t brought myself fully into the ‘how we measure’ social media debate because I haven’t yet decided why we need to measure social media (apart from the usual "so we can justify our existence to the client" which is the one reason not to use to develop metrics, IMHO).

However, the following list of "10 somewhat immutable laws of measuring conversations" from Sean Moffitt helps get us a step closer to defining why we measure social media:

• REACH—how far does it go?
• RELEVANCE—does it support your intended direction?
• INFLUENCE—who shares and with who? How many generations of
  impact?
• AUTHORITY—how trusted is the source?
• ENGAGEMENT—how involved do they get?
• INTERACTION—did they do anything with it?
• VELOCITY—how fast does it travel (viral)
• ATTENTION—how much time do they spend?
• SENTIMENT—how positive are they?
• NET PROMOTER—are they recommending you to others?
  Would you
  recommend Brand X to a friend or colleague? (On a scale of 1-10, the
  formula is "People who say 9-10 (extremely)" minus "those who answer
  1-6" = your score). And this is what really matters
  most.

Hat Tip Karen Miller Russell

Technorati tags: Edelman, social media measurement