I love sports because I like to measure and plan outcomes. My passion came from years of playing sports and analysis of the athlete stats I emulated. These are the fundamentals that immerse you as an athlete, coach or fan. These are the fundamentals that drive the armchair quarterback, sports commentators or fantasy league general manager. Each sport has its system for planning, recording and analyzing players, plays and competitive results – the scorebook. Each scoring event builds baseline knowledge and the decision making data for future planning; batting average, passer rating or free throws made. I love business consulting for the same reasons I love sports – I like to measure and plan outcomes. What is your system for scoring your social business? Are you keeping a scorebook?

I was invited to present on the topic of social media measurement recently at two great social media camps; thanks to both The Advertising Research Foundation (@The_ARF) and PR+MKTG Camp (@PRMKTGCamp) for organizing catalysts for conversation. At The ARF Social Media Bootcamp I engaged discussion on the topic of “measuring social media’s effectiveness” and at PR+MKTG Camp East my panel workshopped and discussed “establishing business impact metrics and analytics.” These topics aligned well to our Social Architecture framework for business planning and Customer Participation.

Both events generated questions about social media indices like Klout or the Vitrue Social Media Index. They also inquired about key measurement indicators such as Facebook Likes and more. These are questions that clients and groups like these commonly ask. It is the social nature of our medium that generates new metrics and more measurement confusion; because we can measure it does not mean we should. Kate Rush Sheehy (@katerushsheehy) brings home this point in her post “measure what matters.”

The reality is that the indices and Likes have unique value but they also have no value at all if not relevant to business goals. Business success in Customer Participation or social media is driven by strategic planning and insights that inform our tactical decisions and execution. Your measurement approach must be aligned to your business goals and designed to build your baseline statistics through your scorebook.

• Monitoring: Keyword monitoring and reputation are just starting points for monitoring. A social monitoring process to provide insights to your marketing, sales, service and communications teams must align the unique needs of these organizations. The Social Architecture offered by Cynthia Pflaum (@cpflaum) outlines this well in her post “committing to social media monitoring.”
• Competitive: Moving beyond community size comparisons as your sole criteria for “how are we doing.” Evaluate your competitors with similar study to the measure of your performance. Tom Cummings (@tomcummings) recently posted about this “is your company good at social media?”
• Editorial: Each post is measured by topic, supporting media, targeting, frequency, language and other supporting campaigns/communication, etc… The results build your baseline and when applied externally inform about the baseline of competitors.
• Engagement: Each social action offered to your community is to drive engagement. Monitoring and weighting of these community actions will provide data points about their engagement with your editorial, apps or overall offering. This reaction to your action helps to inform about your community health or growth. Another key metric for evaluating the momentum of your competitors.

Your scorebook will be part of your framework to track of your posts and comments just as you would record pitches, hits and runs. This baseline will inform your overall Social Architecture strategy and your day-to-day gameplan. Your foundation and situational understanding of your community, your content and other relevant context are your points of validation for your business planning with your organization. Your investment in your core data is essential to social business success and it just might help you odds in your office fantasy sports pool.