Social is increasingly important as a marketing channel. But, how do you measure the impact and effectiveness of your social initiatives? Four elements define your social impact:

via About Social Analytics – Analytics Help.

Just how much value do you represent to these companies? Backupify, a cloud data backup service, decided to do some quick math. The infographic below gives you a glimpse. Dividing the estimated valuation of the company by the number of users tells you, roughly, how much value each user contributes to the company’s value.

via How much is a tweet worth? About 1/10,000 as much as a Yelp review | VentureBeat.

Measuring the value of social media has been a challenge for marketers. And with good reason: it’s hard to understand exactly what is happening in an environment where activity occurs both on and off your website. Since social media is often an upper funnel player in a shopper’s journey, it’s not always easy to determine which social channels actually drive value for your business and which tactics are most effective.

But as the social industry matures, marketers and web analysts need true outcome-oriented reports. After all, although social is growing in popularity, brand websites – not social networks – remain the place where people most often purchase or convert.

via Capturing The Value Of Social Media Using Google Analytics – Analytics Blog.

Whoever works with analytics on a day-to-to-day basis knows how important it is to have a continuity with the data. Any slip might be fatal: data can disappear, trends misunderstood and jobs lost. Losing data can have long-lasting consequences, as very often it isn’t possible to reprocess the data—so what is lost cannot be recovered.

via Keep Your Analytics Data Safe And Clean | Smashing Magazine.

About three weeks ago, I celebrated my first anniversary as Principal Analyst of Altimeter Group. And, it is with great pride that I mark the occasion with the release of my first official Altimeter report, “The Rise of Digital Influence.” Not a traditional market report, it was written as both a primer and a how-to guide for businesses to spark desirable effects and outcomes through social media influence.

We live in a time when social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, et al., not only connect us, they become part of our digital lifestyle. But it’s not just about how these networks help us connect and communicate with others. Whether we know it or not, our social activity now contributes to our stature within each network. New services such as Klout, PeerIndex among many others not only measure who you know, what you say, and what you do, they attempt to score or rank your ability to influence those to whom you’re connected. As a result, social network users are now starting to rethink how they connect and communicate to improve their stature within each network. And at the same time, brands are taking notice as these services also help organizations identify individuals who are both connected and relevant to help expand reach into new media and markets.

via Report: The Rise of Digital Influence and How to Measure It – Brian Solis.

A new study about digital influence says Klout and other social media measurement tools don’t really define how users influence their networks.

All too commonly, sites like Klout and PeerIndex claim to measure influence — and maybe they do measure influence. But what does digital influence really mean?

via Klout Doesn’t Really Measure Influence [STUDY].

Over the past month, Google and Adobe have attempted to answer that question. Both companies have released tools that let marketers track their marketing spending through social media. Such data aims to provide some concrete ROI behind the touchy-feely world of Likes, retweets and +1s — data that, on its own, amount to what Phil Mui, group product manager for Google Analytics, dubs “vanity metrics.”

via Beyond Likes: How Google and Adobe Aim to Measure Your True Social ROI.

Social media analytics and tracking can be very time-consuming and expensive. You’ll find quite a few smart social media monitoring tools, but what if you can’t afford them?

That’s why many social media marketers and power users are in constant search of free, efficient alternatives. Here, we’ll share a few ready-made spreadsheets you can copy (navigate File + Make a copy) and use for social media analytics. They are free, highly customizable and extremely easy to use.

Most of the scripts that run the spreadsheets are “public,” meaning you can access them from the Tools + Script Gallery menu (this also means they were reviewed and approved by Google Spreadsheets team).

via 5 Essential Spreadsheets for Social Media Analytics.

You’ve spent all year writing and sharing great content. And from time to time, you check to see how your posts perform. But when you look at that report—whether it’s in bit.ly, Google Analytics, or your social media management tool of choice—how do you interpret it? Is 100 clicks good? Is 1,000 clicks good?If you don’t frame your performance correctly, your boss won’t recognize your impact. If you want to demonstrate success, you need to go further than simply reporting on the raw traffic you drove.Fortunately, demonstrating your success can be easy. Just follow these three steps: Measure the right stuff Know how you stand up to your peers Choose outliers to tell a story

via Benchmarking Your Social Performance | Social Media Explorer.

As I reviewed those notes, I realized something. Most of them were really about measurement. That’s when it hit me: Search as a topic is interesting—there’s certainly academic value in exploring how search engines work and how we use them—but for all practical purposes, there’s very little perceptual difference between search and measurement. After all, we’re not that interested in what people are searching for in general; we’re interested in what queries people use when they are searching for the kinds of products and services we offer, and especially in how they get from their search to our websites. In other words, what we’re really looking to understand is the feedback loop that exists between search engines and websites, and the key to doing that is in measurement.

In the past year, however, there has been at least one major change to how Google participates in that feedback loop—one you’ve probably noticed and have urgent questions about. I’m going to get to that. In fact, discussing that single change will be the bulk of this article. But before I get there, let me offer a prediction for the coming year that is, for better or worse, largely the result of decisions Google made in the last few months: 2012 will be the year that many of us start paying for analytics. Whether for specific web analytics applications, API integration, or AdWords, we are going to start discovering that consistent, reliable access to data and analysis is well worth budgeting for.

via Why You’ll Start Paying for Analytics in 2012.