In reaction to our social media measurement presentation, I want to do some written summary of it since we don't need to turn in any report or paper on it.

Social media measurement refers to the tracking of various social media content such as blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, social networking sites, video/photo sharing websites, forums, message boards, and user-generated content in general as a way for marketers to determine the volume and sentiment around a brand or topic in social media.There are both entry level free tools and enterprise platforms available for use by digital marketers and PR professionals.

The three most powerful things that social media does for your business are:
1.) It drives traffic to your website: 61% of companies said that social media led to an increase in their website traffic.
2.) It allows you to engage with prospects: The whole idea behind social media is to engage with your network. Having a Facebook Fan Page and Twitter profile allows you to interact with local businesses and your fans and followers in an easy, accessible way.
3.) It builds your brand: There are more than 500 million users registered on Facebook and over 190 million users on Twitter. The more active of a social media presence you have, the more fans you’ll get, and more fans means that more people are aware of who you are and what your brand is.

I would like to talk about the concept of ROI: return on investment -- A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. This is usually what the company management and stakeholders wants. For an organization, it is important to tie their social media to business objectives and metrics, which helps the organization see a clearer picture. There are many social media metrics among different people's mind. Here I adopt these four: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, and Economic Value.

There are many platforms that we can use to measure the performance of our social media, including Google Alerts, Radian 6, Google Trends, Google Insights, Twitter Trends, Linkdex, etc. Many of these are free, so you can measure your social media at any time.

During the discussion period, Prof. Melissa brought up the concept of ROE - Return on expectation, which is really valuable, since social media mainly is effective to build up confidence, trust, satisfaction, and commitment, which are hard to measure. These definitely will increase an organization's economic value overall, but more importantly, it builds up the image and reputation, which is valued by many organizations right now.

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