Measuring Social Media

My column for this month’s Computer in Libraries magazine  on measuring digital media is available this month as a free html.  Since this doesn’t happen very often, I thought it was worth noting :-)

• Measuring Social Media and the Greater Digital Landscape

  
  
  Remember the good old days of the internet, when the measurement of your organization’s digital landscape was merely tracked in page hits, site visits, and unique visitors? The tools used for tracking and reporting website usage were simple and straightforward then. Data always came from the same primary source, the server’s log files.
  
  If you were into detailed analytics, you could extract a huge mountain of data from these files—everything from tracking what sites provided the most traffic through referrals (i.e., links) and what pages were the entry points to the most popular content pages and average time per session. Keeping track of the digital world was definitely easier back then, before Facebook, Twitter, and an explosion of new mobile apps ripped through this simple-to-measure bits and bytes landscape. Today, understanding your organization’s digital impact requires analyzing multiple sets of analytics from a variety of sources. With measurement rulers seldom the same, it’s a challenge to pull it all together.

Read more.