Social media metrics, a video review

Written on August 3, 2010 by in Book Review


This video book review is on Jim Sterne’s Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize your Marketing Investment. This book has a misleading title as it is more theory than actual hard metrics.

I went into this read with high expectations of adding to the arsenal of metrics that I am currently using to measure the social outputs. However, all I received was a dose of rehashed material for the bulk of the book.

If you are new to the social media game, it may be worth picking up, however if you’ve been at it a while, you can sit out on this read.

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jeffespo

Hi Lauren,
What I was looking for was something new to be honest. I have been monitoring and measuring a number of things over the past two years and am a former corporate client of your company's. I have looked at the whitepaper for you guys and am still looking on something different, as we're doing a bunch of those as well as others that weren't mentioned.

Best word to describe it was looking for inspiration and falling flat.

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vargasl

Fair review. As a person that writes a lot of content and speaks about measurement, I would be very curious to know what you are specifically seeking. Do you want the list of available metrics, what they mean and how to get there? Have you seen the Radian6 eBook on metrics? Is this closer to what you want? http://www.radian6.com/resources/library/social...

Lauren Vargas
Sr. Community Manager at Radian6
@VargasL

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jeffespo

Tommy - you need to use a number of metrics all at once to get the best

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Tommy is my name

I'll agree that Sterne probably should have written a better book. Link value I'll even give you, but can SIM really be considered a "true metric" or the de-facto stand alone metric at this point? SIM itself is just over a year old and RazorFish admits that it's flawed.

I'm not sure any one metric is "The one" yet. I think to get a well rounded perspective on true influence a combination of SIM, Klout.com, ratio of impressions to feedback, and how often blogs or other sites link need to be all taken into consideration.

My trouble with the Social Influence Marketing score is that it's not really measuring influence, it's measures sentiment, and they're not the same thing.

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jeffespo

I disagree, true metrics like the SIM score and values for individual links can be done manually and with formulas. I use a number of different tools already and can tell the value of individual interactions that we have daily. We can track on a monthly or day over day level as well.

With Sterne's analytical background and title of the book you would assume that it was more high level on different types of measures.

I am comfortable with what we use now, however, would like more and will continue to make things work with the data and tools available.

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Tommy is my name

Books like that really can only talk about theory because in order to really get a true "How to" you have to really be reading stuff that's platform specific.

And really different tools can be used to measure different things. I like Vocus for some things and radian 6 for others. And even there are other free tools that can be used that do things that the paid tools don't, or do differently.

What are you looking to get out of measuring?

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  1. Tweets that mention Social media metrics, a video review | Jeff Esposito's Blog -- Topsy.com says:
    August 3, 2010 at 6:58 am

    [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by jeffespo and Rebecca Denison, Cheryl Hilpert. Cheryl Hilpert said: RT @jeffespo Social media metrics, a video book review http://bit.ly/9OJJdq [...]

  2. Paying it forward | Jeff Esposito's Blog says:
    August 10, 2010 at 1:53 am

    [...] week ago, I did a review of Jim Sterne’s Social Media Metrics, that was not too flattering. In response, Jim tweeted that a refund was in the mail. I thought [...]

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