Not a week goes by without my seeing yet another article or blog post bemoaning the fact that social media marketing cannot be measured or touting a new, “revolutionary” way of measuring word of mouth (WOM).

I really enjoy this lively debate but my own experience at KML and beyond has made me a believer: social media marketing can be measured and most campaigns can be evaluated on an ROI basis.

There are several issues that I believe create the brouhaha around metrics and social media marketing.

• Most companies do not take the time to define what their social media goals are in measurable terms to determine what their success metrics are. And many times, agencies are just as guilty.  As one often says, you cannot manage what you do not measure and you cannot measure what you do not define.

• Every social campaign, even for the same brand or product or property, will have different metrics attached to it. Because the objectives of campaigns and the environment and circumstances in which they are implemented will differ, so should their metrics. A campaign may need to focus on conversions to measure its ROI, another may be all about buzz and awareness with yet another’s success measured on time spent engaging with a specific tool or piece of content.  And too often, we see marketers using the same old, and usually irrelevant, online metrics of pageviews, unique visitors, etc.

• Here’s an ugly little myth: “even if you can figure out what to measure with WOM/social media marketing, the measurement methodologies are so unreliable as to make the results meaningless.” Nonsense. Word of Mouth, social media, non-traditional online marketing analytics are just as accurate as traditional offline and online analytics, but because the marketing methods themselves are new, their measurement has not been codified into accepted standards.  And there are sometimes several ways or methodologies to track one specific metric.  This, however, does not make these measuring tools inaccurate but it does make them more likely to be influenced by subjective interpretations.

• Social media marketing measurement tools are developed and released on almost a daily basis and existing methodologies are being constantly refined which will give our industry trustworthy tools much faster in its lifecycle than any other advertising or marketing field before.

Stay tuned for part 2 which will list some of the free and paid measurement tools that we are huge fans of at KARMA Media Labs.