Based on work by Michael Wolfe, Bottom Line Analytics

Everyone agrees that social media measurement is important, but figuring out how to do it hasn’t been easy. There are many tools to measure social media activity, and some like socialmention.com, are even free. But until now, there hasn’t been a systematic approach to measuring the financial returns from social media efforts, much less a way to evaluate their contributions relative to traditional media.

By now, we all know that social media is not just a different kind of megaphone.  It literally makes it possible to reach out and touch someone in a way that is as personal as a phone call or an email, but far less intrusive. It can also be more impactful. Two short case studies illustrate the point:

‘Conversation marketing’ (do we even have a name for it yet?) is enabling unprecedented levels of customer intimacy. It touches every marketing discipline from customer service to corporate PR. It is going beyond marketing to have impact in areas such as productivity, cost control and HR.  Social media has special resonance among young consumers, every brand’s future market.  Social media has brought a resurgence of creativity in integrated marketing that hasn’t been seen since Burger King featured a funky chicken, BMW offered free 7-minute feature films and Audi stole its own car.

I attended two conferences in June, the iMedia Brand Summit in Miami and the Edelman New Media Academic Summit in New York. The titles of these conferences sound a lot alike, but the focus of the two events was entirely different.

It’s practically a given truth that to build a brand that resonates with Millennials you must be active in social media. Whether this is true or simply a fad is something brand marketers are now wrestling with.

Not long ago, marketers were obsessed with identifying the right message. Communications strategy really meant ‘what do we want to convey about our brand or product’? Many hours were spent studying the consumer and the competition to come up with something relevant and unique to say.