I just wanted to share this excellent article on measuring social media. Since it is still a fairly new media, its interesting to see how advertisers are coming up with new ways to define their success, often putting the bulk of the power in the consumers hands. Read on for a quick excerpt and for the full article visit MediaPost Publications.

Five Ways To Measure Social Media 
by Jim Sterne, Friday, August 28, 2009, 11:45 AM 

 Ahhhhh -- social media. Addictive. Fun. Downright social!   But how valuable is it? How do you tell?

There are dozens of reckoning tools online to tally up any and all countable social media elements. Most of them are interesting and some actually useful. Rather than drill down into specifics, let's take a bird's-eye view of the types of measurements that might prove useful to the marketing professional.

We're looking to answer these questions:

1. Did they get the chance? Put up a billboard on the highway and so many thousand commuters have an "opportunity to see" your message -- unless they were texting, applying makeup, tuning the radio, disciplining their kids or, heaven forbid, watching traffic. Put an ad on TV and so many million viewers have an "opportunity to see" your message. Unless they were fast-forwarding, texting, applying makeup, tuning the radio, disciplining their kids or, most likely, answering nature's call. Or the phone.

Send out a message online, and some unknown number of people will have the opportunity to see it if -- they have already subscribed, befriended or followed you or know somebody who did. And the glory of social networking is that they might only have known somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody .. who did.

So there's your first metric: the base number of people who are in a position to get a message from you directly. Your RRS readers, newsletter subscribers, Web site visitors -- throw them all into the stew. These are the ones to whom you are directly connected.