Post on Social Media Breakfast – Social Media Measurement: What’s the ROI? has a few interesting points about measurement I want to comment on.

su.pr: I personally love this URL shortener because it’s much more accurate than bit.ly, plus it shoots your content into Stumble Upon, which helps with your search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

Looked at su.pr briefly and found I liked it – if only that it links Stumbleupon, Twitter and Facebook together; occasionally, I get spikes of traffic to my blogs from StumbleUpon, but they’re rarely significant numbers – 100 or 200 hundred, and not sustained.  As far as the Metrics part, I’ll see if the post I just submitted to su.pr gets more traffic than it would have, and what the metrics collected on su.pr turn out to look like.

Thought leadership: You’ll know whether or not this is successful if you’re invited to speak at conferences, on panels, interviewed for stories, or people are linking to your blog/Web site when they publish content. Unless you eventually get paid for these things, it won’t automatically translate to dollars and cents, but everyone wants to work with the popular, smart kid and the more you’re out there, the more business you’ll drive.

This week, I began doing some PR Metrics work and my mind was racing for ways to identify influentials who you may want to outreach to.  Someone close to me brought up an interesting point – there are individuals who are influential, but don’t blog, and would not be picked up at all, by Influence Widgets in Radian6, or anything else, much (perhaps Twitter, in this case) – and how would you identify, in any case, individuals who really are influential?

Was thinking … is it some ratio between the number of comments in blog posts; in short, is it anything I could “program” using the Radian6 Influencer EQ Weightings and the right key phases? (see below)

Even thought about defining a set of Influentials, first, coming up with the best keyword and influencer weightings to isolate them, and then modify it to pick up other  queries and subjects, that could be used, then, for blogger outreach.

But even if that worked, I’d be missing something – something obvious – most of the influencing people who are influential are doing – is happening offline, and might not be directly measurable by a tool like Radian6 or Crimson Hexagon, or anything else, without the addition of a few more pieces of information – and the text, quoted above, provides the best proxy I can think of…

if you’re invited to speak at conferences, on panels, interviewed for stories, or people are linking to your blog/Web site when they publish content

I get invited to conferences as press, and sometimes, to speak at them, like MIMA, in Minneapolis, in about 6 weeks, and I’ve spoken at Emetrics Summit and the Social Media Roundtables in New York and Toronto, along with a few other events – all of this information is online, crawlable by a search engine, and potentially, possible to merge with Radian6 Influencers, SM2/Techrigy/Alterian, Crimson Hexagon, etc – but no one yet does it.

My guess is, no one thought of it, yet, and crawling events and linking them up with a Social Profile (say, as Radian6 is beginning to do with it’s Social Profile/Social Graph feature) might provide the missing key to finding out who really is Influential.

As the person who took the notes at Social Media Breakfast pointed out – “….you’ll know whether or not this is successful if you’re invited to speak at conferences, on panels, interviewed for stories, or people are linking to your blog/Web site when they publish content. Unless you eventually get paid for these things, it won’t automatically translate to dollars and cents, but everyone wants to work with the popular, smart kid and the more you’re out there, the more business you’ll drive.

The next step for Radian6, is to write a crawler that goes out and pulls this data and merges it with the Social Profiles they are collecting already, attempts to score the conference attendances – then integrates it as a weighting factor for influentials.

Problem solved – Influentials identified – many who are falling through the cracks now.  On the other hand, many who might appear influential, given the current metrics, might not really be Influential – on a particular subject your might want to do a blogger outreach to them for.   How to do the scoring – that’s something I need to think about more – but I think, if you can just collect conference attendance, speaking engagements, even press coverage – you can say, “this individual is influential” – lets give them some more points in our weighting algorithm.

Recruiting new talent: I’m sorry to headhunters out there, but social media is going to put you out of business. You absolutely can recruit new talent just by being open and transparent about a day in the life of your company, what your culture is like, and what the vision is for the business. You’ll attract people who want to work with you just by being out there.

Sounds like Monster, Careerbuilder, HotJobs, and the rest are in for a rough patch – not that I didn’t say that, before; they have to redefine themselves, or cease to be relevent.

Brand loyalty through engagement: It doesn’t matter what your business is – B2B or B2C – if you’re engaging with your customers, you are creating loyalty. Today people EXPECT to have a personal relationship with the people who work at the companies they buy from, including the CEO. And if people are loyal because they have a personal relationship with you, you can make a mistake, apologize, and not lose the customer.

I am thinking about how I hate(d) DreamHost, how lousy the Shared Hosting Env I had this blog on till earlier this week, has been, and now, how being on a Virtual Private Server with DreamHost – is a much better experience.   While not perfect, yet, every problem I have had in the last week was promptly responded to and fixed, as soon as I was directly interacting with DreamHost Support instead of depending on a friend, whose account I had my blog on.    Now … I feel better about DreamHost – because they are “engaged” with me ( i suppose, you can say, I am more “engaged” with DreamHost as well.

It’s not the problems that define loyalty, it’s how you respond to them.   Interesting.

Enough of a post for a Saturday afternoon in August – time to go offline, for a bit.