To recap our previous entry on measurement salvation for social media marketing, we recommended these important steps:

1. Identify what measures can be used to define success for your campaign.
2. Do this for every separate campaign, do not use the same measures for expediency’s sake.
3. Assign benchmark values to each measure as a threshold for success.
4. Select measurement tools/methodologies.
5. Do a pre-campaign assessment on all measures to use as a baseline.
6. Track changes over the course of the campaign but also compare post-campaign values to pre-campaign values.
7. Do a post-campaign analytical evaluation of the tools, their accuracy, ease of use, etc.
8. Feed that freshly acquired knowledge and experience into your next campaign’s analytics strategy.

To help implement the steps above, here are some of the tools, both free, and for-pay, that we have tested and endorse.

FREE TOOLS

• BlogPulse, for blog mentions.
• BoardReader, for forum/bulletin board mentions.
• SiteVolume for Twitter, Digg, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr mentions.
• Twist for Twitter mentions.
• Quantcast for site statistics including demographics.
• Google Trends for search volume.
• Facebook Insights for detailed analytics for Facebook Pages.
• YouTube Insights for detailed analytics for videos.

FEE BASED TOOLS:

• Radian6 for thorough coverage of all social media activity, sentiment (coming soon) and influencer identification, as well as workflow tools.
• Andiamo Systems for the same type of coverage as Radian6 but with the addition of human involvement in tracking and configuration vs. Radian6’s self-supported and fully automated system.
• Collective Intellect for the same type of coverage as Radian6 and Andiamo Systems but with additional bells and whistles and deeper analytical support, for a much higher price tag…
• Meteor/Fyreball to track word of mouth dissemination and virality.
• Divinity Metrics for video analytics across multiple platforms including demographics, and influencer identification.

Every day, there are new tools and ways to measure the impact of your campaigns, just remember the most important measurement tool needs to be balanced against the overall goal.