Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment [Hardcover]

This is an entirely worthless text written by a rambling cynic that's mostly filled with "No s*** Sherlock" tips and tricks. Sadly, it fails to deliver on its promises and is utterly and completely bereft of real scientific methodologies, data tracking tools, or insight into translating social media phenomenon into actionable solutions for your organization, blog, podcast, etc.

Instead of these helpful ideas you'll receive asinine anecdotes and amazing self-serving statements like, "I've spent the last 30 years explaining why computers are so incredible." Even more frustrating is that on occasion the book lands on a great idea, such as "Lots of tools are out there to help you monitor what pearls your wisdom others deem worth of retweeting" but then just leaves it as a passing statement without actually going into any depth on what tools are, how to actually scrub for things like BOTS vs real people, how to use them or which one is more advantageous, etc.

In short, Social Media Metrics is easily the worst business text in my library.

Jim Sterne describes in this book techniques and strategies that are essential in order to optimize companies' efforts when it comes to Social Media efforts. This is the first book in this arena and it is a game changer for companies looking to increase their social presence and profitability in any social media: forums, review sites, social networks, blogs, microblogs, and others.

The book will help readers to manage Social Media as a serious business tool, a corporate asset in a world where companies become more aware / vulnerable to customers' opinions and needs. It will help them convince upper management to invest resources in social media and understand how profitable Social Media is for the organization.

As the author writes:

"Success in social media is not found in how many people got your message; it's found in how many people thought your message was remarkable - literally. How many people were intrigued enough by the point you were making to comment on it and pass it along to their friends?"

If your company (large or small) is trying to make a difference and succeed in the online world, I warmly recommend this book.

The purpose of Social Media Metrics is not to convince companies about the importance of social media: "If you're still not sure whether social media is important or is important to your company, save this book for later." I'd love every company to read this statement as a litotes of sorts and realize that understanding what social media metrics is about is precisely an excellent pathway to understanding how important social media is. Ergo: I highly recommend this book to any business owner or marketer.

The book starts with the 100 ways to measure social media in November 2009 by David Berkowitz, and once you know that, you must identify your goals and define the KPIs that indicate how efficiently such goals are met - and get inspired by Katie Delahaye Paine's measurement standards. When your goals are clear, you want to get attention and know if your message is reaching the right people, and the nature and the scope of their influence (that Jim Sterne designates through a neologism "influencity". Ultimately you want to identify your actual amplifiers, i.e. the people who expand the impact of your message, making sure they stay engaged - and sit high on the "engagement food chain." However, winning people's hearts and minds also requires a real and continuous commitment from marketers to listen methodically, as recommended by Jeremiah Owyang in his Eight Stages of Listening, participating in the conversation and eventually anticipating followers' expectations, and by doing so, driving and accelerating favorable business outcomes. Now convince your boss or your colleagues, and do so by showing to them that social media is not a touchy-feely story, but an end-to-end metrics-driven process!

What I like about the book:
- It's an action-oriented framework with minimal blah blah.
- Jim Sterne doesn't try to reinvent it all, and refers oecumenically (and relevantly) to a variety of authors, consultants, and practitioners.
Although the book offers an appendix of important resources, marketers who are new to social media metrics would benefit from a summary bibliography and linkography.