Measuring social media at Social Media Influence

I’m delighted to have been asked to be a panelist at Social Media Influence tomorrow.

I’ve attended every year since its first carnation 4 years ago as Blogging4business. Inspiring speakers such as Antony Mayfield, Suw Charman-Anderson, Hugh McLeod and Struan Robertson thrilled us with their visions of how business should embrace a brave new social media world.

I had a seminal moment at that very first Blogging4business event. I decided it was time for a career move from the world of PR to one where conversations about ‘nodes and networks’ ‘RSS’ and ‘buzz monitoring; were greeted with interest and comprehension rather than a glazed look and “actually, I think we’re looking for coverage in the ‘red tops’ and regional press.”

Thankfully, the PR Industry has moved on, client understanding and expectations have changed, many specialists and agencies are knowledgeable and powerful voices within social media measurement debates.

Tomorrow I’m on the Social Media Influence Panel – “Social Media Measurement - Planning Campaigns and Understanding the ROI”. This is of particular interest to me for a number of reasons:

1.       We at Econsultancy benchmark and measure our online PR and social media activity – I will share some thoughts about how we plan and measure our social media marketing activity

2.       A large part of my professional career has been in PR. I’m seeing the metrics and approaches that other digital marketing specialists use to measure ROI and hard and soft social media objectives and I like what I see

3.       Econsultancy is a supporter of and contributor to Measurementcamp, a group of talented and generous people including clients, agencies, vendors and consultants all working together to try to create a best practice approach to measuring social media. I’ve learned a lot from some amazing people

I’m looking forward to being part of another group discussing simplifying the social media measurement process, learning from other marketing disciplines and their metrics. I’m sure that I’ll learn from those of you attending as well as fellow panelists and speakers.

If you are attending, please do come and say hello. As much as I love social media you can’t beat a good old real world ‘gas’ over coffee and a Jammie Dodger.