With our involvement in the PR, search and direct marketing industries through consulting and speaking at conferences, we’ve seen a huge boost in resources allocated to understanding and implementing various social media marketing tactics.
Despite that, the meaning of social media as a marketing/PR channel doesn’t seem to extend outside personal universes of interest. ie, search marketers often look at social media as using tools like Digg or StumbleUpon to drive web site traffic. PR practitioners often see social media as a branding tool using sites like YouTube & Facebook.
Regardless of the intent, social media marketing efforts are moot unless methods of measurement are in place. Which leads me to the Reader Poll Question:
[poll id=”34″]
I wanted to keep the actual poll options brief and am really looking forward to seeing specific tools and their context of use mentioned in the comments. Our reviews of BuzzLogic, Collective Intellect and Radian6 are overdue but will be posting soon. They will be followed by reviews of several other tools related to social media metrics and a roundup of resources related to the topic.
