One of the questions that came out of the recent Inc. 500 social media study was how can a business measure the success of their social media campaigns? Eric Peterson who writes for Web Analytics Demystified has recently written a series of articles on this topic.

Instead of traditional analytics like visitors and page views, Eric instead measures how “engaged” a visitor is when they come to your site. Eric defines an engaged visitor as:

• Reading my weblog
• Reading other user generated content on the web site
• Participating in a truly social activity facilitated by my site
• Joining a social network of web analytics people
• Contributing content directly to the web site
• Submitting a comment to my weblog
• Emailing me directly

The premise then is that visitors who also subscribed to some type of “push” feed are more engaged than those who view content sporadically. What I like about this premise is that you can identify and measure both moderate value and high value engagements. A moderate value engagement might be someone who reads your blog while a high value engagement could be someone who contributes content directly to the web site.

What is interesting about this approach is the similarities with some work we have done with e-commerce web sites. The moderate and high value activities are in essence conversion points. Whether you are asking someone to sign-up for a newsletter, coupon, add a comment or buy a product from you are creating a conversion event that can be tracked and measured.

Of course what you end up measuring is dependant on your business goals are. As Jeremiah Owyang put it:

Some folks tied measurement back to hard ROI: (Does Social Media shorten the sales cycle/reduce cost, and does it increase revenues). For other companies, business blogging is about thought leadership, or building better products, how could you apply these models to the Wells Fargo blogs, that are designed at reaching out to communities?

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