Views from the West – A blog about public relations & social media in the Rocky Mountains

Quite often, the question about how to effectively measure the success of a public relations campaign comes up in our community. So it is no surprise the same debate is occurring about the measurement of social media efforts. Before talking about social media measurement, let’s set one thing straight – social media should never live on its own, but is part of a strategic communications plan to achieve whatever the company or organization’s goal(s) may be.

When using social media in your communications strategy, there are many free ways to monitor the success of your online efforts. For many, this is basic information. But, for those of you looking for some simple ways to track social media, here are a few of our favorite free tools:

Technorati and Google Blog Search – blog search engines

Icerocket – blog, Web, Twitter, MySpace and other searches

Google Alerts – set up with your key words and receive alerts sent to your e-mail when the key word appears online (including Facebook, Twitter, news and more)

Google Analytics – add a little code to your Web site and see stats on its performance

TweetBeep – another key-word search that sends e-mails when your key word is dropped in Twitter

There are many other ways to track your social media programs, but more importantly, you must address what you are tracking. Audience engagement? Pure statistics? Share of the conversation? Many services that charge for social media monitoring programs are worth the cost, if you have the budget. Radian6 and Filtrbox are examples of companies worth looking into if you can move out of the free realm to monitor your social media efforts.

What are some of your favorite tools that measure social media success and what specifically do you find most important to measure?