I recently spoke at a WebGuild event titled “Web Analytics: Measure Social Media Engagement.” Great panelists including Carla Bourque, VP Media & Entertainment, Nielsen Online, Eddie Smith, VP Marketing and Business Development, Socialmedia.com, Giovanni Rodriguez, Managing Partner, Conversation Group. The moderator was Andreas Weigand, former Amazon Chief Scientist.

We discussed a variety of topics. My focus was to discuss real-life examples of how companies advantage of Social Media whether it be blogs, Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. At Position2 we work with clients to drive user engagement and leads with Social Media. There are technology companies like Coverity that connect with their community with Twitter in addition to media sites like Effinfunny that create special micro-sites and Facebook Pages to drive conversations.

Everyone is looking for a silver bullet for which new metric that should look towards. The panel recommended metrics like email forwards, sharing rates, recommendations in addition to click through, lead form fill, webinar sign-up, or time on site vs. bounce rate. Unfortunately, there is no single metric. It all depends on the business or the goal. A B2B firm selling software is going to have different goals than a consumer media site. One thing that is important is the need to dedicate resources to this fast-growing medium. Another is to give time to optimize as there are many ways to make things work. It is a game of applying best practices in a customized and iterative manner.

Thank you Daya at WebGuild for inviting me to speak. Also, thank you to the attendees for your engaging questions and comments.

Outsell, a market research firm released the article below. From what I’ve seen the media spend number make sense. It shows that there is a continuing shift to online media:
Spending on total US advertising and marketing will grow 3.9% in 2008 to reach $412.4 billion, with the advertising portion reaching $249.1 billion, according to the third annual ad spending report by Outsell, Inc., which said growth has declined from 2007’s 5.8%.

The report covers five key media types: online, print, events, TV/radio and others. Outsell surveyed 1,088 US advertisers on their spending plans for the year.

Among the significant findings:

• Companies are spending 61.8% of their online ad/marketing budgets - $65.1 billion - on their own sites, siphoning dollars away from other options. As a result, publishers are beginning to offer their own advertising/marketing services to recapture lost revenue.
• The fastest-growing of all ad types is online, which is expected to grow 12.3% in 2008 to $105.3 billion (or $40.2 billion excluding advertisers’ spending on their own sites). As a result, online spending now exceeds TV/radio/movies for the first time ($98.5 billion).
• Advertisers’ spending on traditional media remains significant - with print capturing 35.5% of spending ($147.0 billion) and events at 12.5% of the total ($51.7 billion). 54% of advertisers spread budgets across three or more media types.
• Out of 26 methods measured for effectiveness, advertisers rate their websites as the best for lead generation (75% effective), followed by exhibitions (66%), custom print publications (65%), direct mail marketing (64%), and trade magazines (64%).
• Asked what metrics they would track if they could track only three, advertisers point most frequently to cost per sale (46%), cost per lead (37%), and cost per click (32%).