Customer Reviews

Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment (New Rules Social Media Series)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Jim Sterne describes in this book techniques and strategies that are essential in order to optimize companies' efforts when it comes to Social Media efforts. This is the first book in this arena and it is a game changer for companies looking to increase their social presence and profitability in any social media: forums, review sites, social networks, blogs, microblogs, and others.

The book will help readers to manage Social Media as a serious business tool, a corporate asset in a world where companies become more aware / vulnerable to customers' opinions and needs. It will help them convince upper management to invest resources in social media and understand how profitable Social Media is for the organization.

As the author writes:

"Success in social media is not found in how many people got your message; it's found in how many people thought your message was remarkable - literally. How many people were intrigued enough by the point you were making to comment on it and pass it along to their friends?"

If your company (large or small) is trying to make a difference and succeed in the online world, I warmly recommend this book.

This is an entirely worthless text written by a rambling cynic that's mostly filled with "No s*** Sherlock" tips and tricks. Sadly, it fails to deliver on its promises and is utterly and completely bereft of real scientific methodologies, data tracking tools, or insight into translating social media phenomenon into actionable solutions for your organization, blog, podcast, etc.

Instead of these helpful ideas you'll receive asinine anecdotes and amazing self-serving statements like, "I've spent the last 30 years explaining why computers are so incredible." Even more frustrating is that on occasion the book lands on a great idea, such as "Lots of tools are out there to help you monitor what pearls your wisdom others deem worth of retweeting" but then just leaves it as a passing statement without actually going into any depth on what tools are, how to actually scrub for things like BOTS vs real people, how to use them or which one is more advantageous, etc.

In short, Social Media Metrics is easily the worst business text in my library.

The purpose of Social Media Metrics is not to convince companies about the importance of social media: "If you're still not sure whether social media is important or is important to your company, save this book for later." I'd love every company to read this statement as a litotes of sorts and realize that understanding what social media metrics is about is precisely an excellent pathway to understanding how important social media is. Ergo: I highly recommend this book to any business owner or marketer.

The book starts with the 100 ways to measure social media in November 2009 by David Berkowitz, and once you know that, you must identify your goals and define the KPIs that indicate how efficiently such goals are met - and get inspired by Katie Delahaye Paine's measurement standards. When your goals are clear, you want to get attention and know if your message is reaching the right people, and the nature and the scope of their influence (that Jim Sterne designates through a neologism "influencity". Ultimately you want to identify your actual amplifiers, i.e. the people who expand the impact of your message, making sure they stay engaged - and sit high on the "engagement food chain." However, winning people's hearts and minds also requires a real and continuous commitment from marketers to listen methodically, as recommended by Jeremiah Owyang in his Eight Stages of Listening, participating in the conversation and eventually anticipating followers' expectations, and by doing so, driving and accelerating favorable business outcomes. Now convince your boss or your colleagues, and do so by showing to them that social media is not a touchy-feely story, but an end-to-end metrics-driven process!

What I like about the book:
- It's an action-oriented framework with minimal blah blah.
- Jim Sterne doesn't try to reinvent it all, and refers oecumenically (and relevantly) to a variety of authors, consultants, and practitioners.
Although the book offers an appendix of important resources, marketers who are new to social media metrics would benefit from a summary bibliography and linkography.

"I was enthusiastic to read my first book by social media expert, Jim Sterne.

With a glowing endorsement by David Meerman Scott, I felt assured that I would glean great insights into the world of Leading Tools, Strategies and Metrics of Social Media...

However, this book's 9 Chapters only delivered unique, valuable content in Chapter 8: "Getting Buy-In,Convincing Your Colleagues"...The rest of Sterne's material seems like repurposed material from other thought leaders like David Meerman Scott, Steve Krug, the Eisenberg brothers, Halvorson, Jaffe and others.

I was really looking forward to a meaty discussion on best practices in the deployment of Social Media tactics, but this only skimmed at best...I would pass on this one.

I've been in the biz since 1981 and thought I knew a few things about how the web works. Within the first five pages I was lost in a sea of new ideas about the web. I took margin notes and looked up a number of the links. I'm not sure I'll be "done" with this book for months or even years. Don't worry about being overwhelmed but to get the most value from this book, you'll put yellow tags in dozens of places. Just don't think you'll use all the information at once. Take a few ideas and work on them. Then a few more a few months later.
The book is really written by the dozen or more people quoted at length. The author gathers them and puts them in reasonable order.
Follow all the links in this 225 page book and you will easily read thousands more.
Go slowly and take notes. I would have liked to have a "secret" web page with all the links mentioned. Some of the URLs are time consuming.

I am now very curious to know how much web traffic is used to measure the web traffic.

If you have a little personal blog or Twitter account or Facebook page, and you don't really care who comments, or re-tweets, or likes your stuff, then don't buy this book. On the other hand, if you're using social media to achieve business results, then this book is worth every penny and then some, and you should scroll up and click "Add to cart".

"If they read it, repeat it, and like it a lot, you're only part of the way home. Tracking the variations in brand affection in the hearts and minds of the public is good. Knowing if their hearts are glowing or growling is important. But measuring the results your social media efforts engender is vital."

Jim Sterne is the real deal and he provides practical insight you can use right now to measure, improve and expand your social media efforts. The additional resources, papers, and case studies linked in the book are also a great bonus and very useful.

Highly recommended.

Most of the social media books I have read recently get straight to the point and lay out the information for me. But this book seemed to run in circles until it got to any meat. This entire book could have provided me the same content in 15 pages or less, AND I wouldn't have wasted my time ready through all the fluff.

If you have any doubts about how important social media is and/or how to approach measuring it, then seriously consider buying this book. I must admit prior to reading this book I wondered/questioned how to measure social media and its real value to a business. We hear how important social media is, but most executives and business owners want to see something to show why they should spend their money on this form of marketing. What's the ROI, how is it going to help the bottom line, improve profits and customer satisfaction in preference to we should do it because everyone else is doing it.

This book answers these questions.

What impressed me
-----------------

Jim Stern spent some time discussing business goals and how there is no point measuring anything if you don't know what you're measuring. Something so simple but so so overlooked. Stern also highlights the importance of identifying what the business objectives are, what social media tools are being used to reach this goal and then finding a suitable metric (of which he lists many, many metrics) to measure the performance of that social media in reaching this goal. I liked this simplicity and this simplicity continued throughout the book.

Initially, I was dubious whether I'd purchase this book. There were few reviews and I wondered given Jim Stern's background in web analytics whether I'd get lost in loads of technical jargon. After all I just want to read a book how to measure social media, not design the software to do it! Jim Stern presented concepts very simply and makes things interesting with a good dose of humor added in. He avoids discussing overly complicated and irrelevant terms, and provides many interesting tools and examples of how to measure social media. For example Jim illustrates how measuring social media in its simplest form is just listening to what your customers are saying. After all social media is just 'word of mouth' but done online.

Jim also draws on the experience of others, showing how they approach measuring social media in a number case studies/examples.

Conclusion
----------

If you're after a book on how to tweet, blog etc, look elsewhere as this book focuses primarily on how to measure your social media efforts. If you want a book on measuring social media, learning how to measure it, setting measurable goals and a book which contains some useful links to social media resources then consider buying this book.

How do you meaningfully measure social media - and match that to business objectives? Arguably, measurement is the starting point for creating a strong social media program, so this book's agenda is very important. Sterne gives a good introduction on metrics and especially on what is important to measure, but the book sometimes appears hastily written (copy edit, anyone?), lacks some detail, and unfortunately is already sounding dated (no fault of the author here, the field is moving fast). Still, a good introduction and worth looking at.

Length:: 5:45 Mins

The video book review & blog post can be found at [...].