http://www.onlineuniversalwork.com

Tatyana — It is all about “top notch PR work.”

Thank you both for stopping by and leaving comments.

I agree with David Scott about companies cannot control their stories and that customers share via social media. Social media is like a big market full of good and bad vendors. It is up to us to choose which vendor we become and how our customers react to us…

Thank you Dianne

Your post is so true… nice going. Somebody else who sees more than just numbers.
This is why we focus on impact, engagement and conversation:

http://howto.commetrics.com/influence/involvement/

So we feel if one blogs these things must be addressed as well. I invite you Diane and all of your readers to just register yourself:

http://My.comMetrics.com

Start benchmarking your blog and watch the trend including the level of engagement you are accomplishing.

Thanks again for this really nice post.

Regards
Urs
@ComMetrics will have to tweet this right now – I will.

@ Clare — How nice to see you! And thank you again for letting me feature your video campaign.

Thank you so much for the shout out on our Waters customer testimonial campaign. We are honored when you mention our work and figure that we must be doing something right if you think so! Thanks again!

Clare

This is what we’re finding as we analyze the results from our recent business social media benchmarking study. There’s an interesting chart on pg. 18 of the top-level report (available at http://www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study) that’s relevant to this discussion. We asked those currently involved with social media initiatives at their companies to indicate how well they can see the impact of these initiatives on their social media success metrics (which they provided in an earlier question). While ‘engagement with prospects’ was the 2nd most used social media success metric, used by 57% of the 1,647 respondents to this question, less than half (43%) of those using ‘engagement with prospects’ reported that data about the impact of their social media initiatives on this metric was either part of standard reports or easily accessible.

In other words, 57% of respondents working for companies where ‘engagement with prospects’ is a key social media success metric have basically no ability to measure this metric. While we didn’t put this in the top-level report, the situation is actually worst for the larger companies in the study. We’ll get into that more when we release the small business version of the report in a few weeks.

And, to the extent any readers see the use of the Albie Hecht example as indicating that prospect and customer engagement may be more relevant and more utilized in the B2C world, I can assure them this is not the case. In the B2B version of our social media benchmarking research (http://www.business.com/info/b2b-social-media-benchmark-study) we show on pg. 36 that there is no statistically significant difference between B2B and B2C companies in the use of this metric.

Again, great perspective Dianna (and everyone else on this thread). If there are more great examples of how to effectively measure engagement, our fellow marketers definitely need them.