Guest post by Eric Melin, Manager Marketing & Communications at Social: IRL sponsor, Spiral16.
Marketers are continually challenged with finding ways to measure their social media programs and digital marketing campaigns.
There are a ton of different metrics out there, but the most important thing that marketers and analysts can do is find that critical correlation between the right metrics that comes together to tell the story — that “north star,” as it were, that will guide your strategy and action going forward.
An article I ran across on Time’s Swampland blog about politics and the economy spells this out even more clearly. It’s called The Most Important Chart in American Politics, and it’s above. The chart identifies the single most crucial piece of President Obama’s 20012 re-election campaign: his political north star.
There are three lines mapped out across a timeline of the last two decades:
“The first two lines — productivity and per capita gross domestic product — are rising. This is the unmistakable American success story, the one reflected in record corporate profits, growing wealth accumulation and the unmatched efficiency of this country’s economy. The third line tracks median household income, as measured by the U.S. Census. It shows the story of frustration and stagnation that so many Americans long ago accepted as a reality.”
It is crystal clear when looking at the chart that the third line diverged from the first two after the year 2000. You could fill up a book debating the causes of that divergence, but the end result is an unmistakable political takeaway: “Much of the U.S. stopped feeling the benefits of a growing national economy.”
How does this apply to social media monitoring?
Business metrics are financial, while web metrics are NOT. The trick is to correlate the two in a meaningful way — like the “political north star” chart above. READ MORE
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