Has your organization recently decided to join the Social Media train before it pulls out, leaving you behind?

Great, so your marketing team or your PR team or perhaps your Sales team has persuaded someone to allow the organization to have a Social Media presence, now what. Whether its Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, a blog or some other platform, now you are out there what are you going to do with the opportunity and how do you communicate with the rest of your organization why you are there and what you are doing?

Sooner or later, and given the current economic climate, most likely sooner, someone is going to start asking you those difficult questions, like “How do we know this is working?”.

Telling the CFO that you are now able to “Throw Sheep, Pass Drinks or Send Plants to 10 more people than yesterday” is probably not going to win them over. Like any communications program there has to be something more measurable.

But measuring your presence on a Social Media platform is not so easy. If you run a commercial on TV with, say an 800 number you can measure call volumes around the times the commercial is aired. You can measure conversions from those calls; you can even break the data down by media regions – all useful metrics. But how do you do that with a platform that has a global audience and that isn’t really interested in hearing your sales pitch?

One of the first things to do is obtain a baseline. How much of a conversation are you currently having with your customers and potential customers before you start the Social Media effort? If you are honest this might be a very low number. The amount that increases is an easy number to track and measure across your Social Media users.

Measuring how many of the interactions you are having that are originated by customers or potential customers is a good way to see the reception that your organization is receiving on a given SM platform.

Depending on the size of your organization and your budget for Social Media, you are probably going to want to invest in some tracking tools. Some of these are free and will certainly give you a reasonable indication of how your SM campaign is doing. However, the downside of these tools is that they tend to be specific to a particular platform or method of communicating or provide only the broadest of statistics. Because of this you may find that you are experiencing increased costs in human resources, because in addition to interacting through the various SM platforms someone will have to obtain the data from all of these tools. It maybe that you find yourself investing in true SM monitoring tools and as such it is best to factor this cost into your original budget.

In the final analysis, all organizations by now should have realized that Social Media is not going away, it is not a fad. True the platforms we use may come into and go out of fashion but the act of engaging with our customers and potential customers in conversations that go far beyond those we have had before will not go away and will only increase. So the best tip for an organization thinking of a Social Media campaign? – Take FDR’s advice – “Do Something. If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t, do something else. - If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

How do you measure your Social Media efforts?

Simon Salt

Simon Salt is CEO & Co-Founder of IncSlingers an Integrated Marketing Communication company. Writer, blogger at his own blog, mashable.com & dad-o-matic. Social Media addict. He can be found on Twitter as @incslinger