It goes to show you that there’s never one way to do things and people will always push the envelope and break out of the box!

What I’m taking away from this post is that we need to measure what we are doing to know if we are being successful, but those measurement are not the same for all of us or for all businesses.

Question that i have …

Does anyone out there measure your impact in social media in terms of developing thought leadership & professional development for employees/staff?

I’d LOVE to hear from Chris and/or some of the community here?!

–
http://twitter.com/franswaa

Well, you can always throw peanutbutter and jelly around the office and see where it sticks, I guess. Good luck with that method. :)

Susan

@Craig – I didn’t say measure=quantity. There are great qualitative and sentiment tools. Those are a great measure. Christopher S. Penn measures on dollars, and that’s a nice measure. Easy, at least. I don’t think the masses are my target. Nope. I just want the right 1000. (Was that Kevin Kelly’s line?)

@Laura- I don’t entirely agree. I think a site is part of it, but I have a post about outposts in your media strategy that conflicts with that thinking a bit. In my mind, media has atomized, and it’s all over the place. Yes, there should be a home base, but the outposts are now just as important because that’s where the fish are. (such as it were).

And for all of you “stuck” on the food analogy: I can eat peanut butter plain, and have many times, so there. Have you tried bananas?

He argued that sometimes measurement isn’t necessarily as important as some people think. He said that sometimes it’s cheaper, for example, to just try many different approaches as opposed to trying one or two and measuring the crap out of them. (at least I think that was his point)

I’m torn between the two. I do think that there is no substitute for metrics, but it is also good to have as much out there in as many different arenas as possible.

Great post and interesting timing. I was just discussing this yesterday with a friend; she’s into SEO, Digg, Stumbleupon and I’ve been using (primarily) social media to build relationships and all but ignoring SEO.

Thanks for the kick in the butt and great advice-I’m now on the sites mentioned above and plan on learning more.

It’s great to point out and remind people that there’s no one right way and to touch the most people you need to use multiple (and measurable) avenues. Even if it takes extra time…

There are no magic bullets in business we all know that (Don’t we?).

Take the time to read his article and make certain you pay attention to the traffic coming in as well as the content that is going out.

I posted this message and linked to Chris’ post on http://www.quired.com/blog.

Chris certainly seems to have the pulse on Social Media.