Recently I’ve noticed an increase in the number of articles/posts predicting that 2010 will be the year of measurement. When marketers using social media finally cross the Rubicon of Results.

While I am hopeful that this is true – that we’ll start measuring what matters, instead of simply counting things – I’m not sure we’re really there yet.

Social media measurement should be about actions, not simply awareness, and to matter, it needs to be tied to the measurements that matter in the business: sales and net revenue. Monitoring sentiment and counting friends, fans and followers is a step along the way to true results measurement. But it’s not the end game.

That said, understanding sentiment is a good first step, and useful for analyzing the impact of social media engagement on revenue. A sentiment score accounts for volume, so you can compare it week to week, regardless of changes in volume. You can then see if there are any trends in lead volume or sales that track consistently over time with shifts in sentiment. If you have an initiative to increase positive sentiment, you can track your results. And so on.

To calculate a simple sentiment score for a given time period, usually week or month:

(Number of positive comments – number of negative comments)/total number of comments, including neutral and mixed) * 100

Net positive mentions divided by total number of comments, which accounts for volume differences week to week. Times 100 to put the answer on a 100-point scale.

The scale runs 100 to -100, with zero the neutral point. The closer to 100 on the positive side, the more positive the sentiment. On the negative side, the more negative.

You don’t need any fancy tools. A spreadsheet will do. All you need is a method for capturing social media mentions across the channels you wish to measure (blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc.), a standard way to assign sentiment to each message and the counts for each sentiment.

Earlier this week, I had an interesting phone call with the marketing person from a game portal. He had called to avail himself of my “one hour free” offer. He primarily wanted to talk about the potential of social bookmarking — such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Kirtsy, Mixx and Reddit  –  as a marketing tactic.

I suspect he was disappointed in the call. Unlike an analyst, I don’t have  great pronouncements about trends. What I do is discuss your business issues and make concrete suggestions for your marketing and social media plans. There is no single answer, just avenues for exploration.

Here’s what you should look at regarding social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking as a tactic is a bit like Google Ads. Easy to do but  hard to do well. To be successful with Google Ads, you need to look at your stats every day. Adjust keywords. Tweak content.

Social bookmarking is the same.You need to look at your web analytics, understand what the social bookmark sites deliver to your site and be willing to tweak your content to be appealing to the ones delivering real traffic, real prospects.

Black hat tactics like paying for submissions are a non-starter. They may deliver traffic — until  you are caught — but the traffic won’t convert. They won’t buy, they won’t come back.

And that’s what you are looking for. Buyers and loyal visitors.

Unlike Google Ads, though, you can get some benefit dabbling in social bookmarking. If you aren’t willing to invest the time to understand which of the social bookmarking sites are productive for you,  you can still get some incidental benefit by placing the links  or a widget like Share This on your site. Or by occasionally pinging your friends to Digg a post. No real investment, no expectation, no worries.

If you want to spend the time though, here’s my suggestion.

First, look at your referrers. Which social bookmarking sites are delivering the most traffic, and the most productive traffic, to your site? It is bound to be different depending on what you write,  what you  offer. Every social bookmarking site has a user base and possibly even a perspective. You need to understand which ones are important to you, to your customers.

Then look at the type of content that attracts these visitors. If it is consistent over time — the same type of content attracts the visitors from a desired social bookmarking site, you have guidance for what to write to attract them in future. It’s not that different from the process used in television ratings. The networks tailor their content to the most productive audience.

It’s simple marketing math.

As  I mentioned in a previous post, I led an advanced workshop on blogger relations at a local pr agency last week. A significant portion of the discussion centered on measurement which offered a great opportunity to revisit my thoughts on the topic. This post covers some of the material I prepared for the workshop.

Measurement isn’t magic.

It’s also not the same as monitoring even though the two activities use some of the same tools and we often confuse them. Monitoring is qualitative. It looks at outputs — media coverage, blog posts, microblog streams. It’s purpose is to evaluate attitudes. It’s extremely important at the outset of any marketing campaign and it can inform part of the measurement. But it is not sufficient in itself. A clip “book” and a calculation of reach (how many people were potentially exposed) is good information to have, but it only measures potential awareness.

And last I heard, no one ever went into business or ran for office to make folks more aware. The goal is to sell some product or win the election. A result.

Monitoring is “tell me everything you know.” Measurement asks specific questions. What was the result? Did we achieve our objectives?

Measurement must be based on a desired behavior or action, not attitude. Outcome, not output.

It is important to choose a measureable outcome, not some squishy thing that can’t be assessed by an action or behavior. The best measures are action or behavior: evaluate a product, intend to buy, recommend, purchase.

Unfortunately,  it isn’t always easy to link marketing campaigns directly to sales and other purchasing behaviors.  So we are often left with web metrics. Useful ones include unique visitors, referrers and path, time on site, and for blog-supported programs, inbound links and comments.

These indicators are better than nothing, but the key to success is to define the measurement at the outset, not as an afterthought and build it into your program.

For example, a dedicated microsite gives you a set of web metrics 100% related to the social media program. A coupon or online discount code lets you track campaign-driven sales. Even something as simple as a badge that customers can put on their own sites can provide some basic information.

The $25,000 question is, why aren’t more people measuring at this depth? Why are we still talking about awareness, not about purchase behaviors?

It’s a combination of fear and ignorance.

Let’s start with the ignorance. We aren’t asking the right questions. If you set your objective as something squishy like “raise awareness,” your measurable result will be equally squishy and irrelevant to business success. Fine and dandy if we could magically pull unlimited  money for marketing programs out of a hat. But we can’t.

This is where the fear comes in. We’re afraid that robust measurement may show that all that wonderful awareness didn’t translate into actual purchase. The more money we spent on the program, the more afraid we are. Safer to stay in the comfort zone of awareness.

Except that won’t fly. Not in this economy, and really, not ever. We must be accountable for results.

We need to shift our thinking a little bit. Big programs that don’t work can be career, or at least job, ending events.  No one wants to be the guy that put forth a huge social media flop.

Think smaller, think pilot programs. Test, measure, evaluate, and then scale up.

Be more tolerant of failure. Fast, less expensive failure, but don’t dismiss a marketing tactic if a program doesn’t have the initial results you wanted. Figure out why so you don’t repeat the same mistake the next time.

And for goodness sake, ask the right questions so you can know, not guess, that you succeeded.

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Finally,  a quick plug for my contest over at Snapshot Chronicles. Prize is a $100 JCPenney gift card.

I’m updating and expanding my blogger relations workshop for a session this Friday, and as a result, have been thinking quite a lot about measurement. I’ll have more to say later this week as I pull all my thoughts together, but in the meantime, I wanted to share this great video about the value of online media. Hat tip Strive PR and the Bad Pitch Blog.

The Online Media from RealWire on Vimeo.

Just because people subscribe to a feed, doesn’t mean they read it. So I’ve been conducting an experiment of sorts. Not particularly scientific and absolutely no baseline measure, so consider it more anecdotal than anything else.

As regular readers know, about a month ago, I moved Marketing Roadmaps to the WordPress platform from TypePad but I did not redirect my Feedburner feed. This was a deliberate choice, as I am convinced that feeds — especially feeds that have been active for four years as the original Roadmaps one was — accumulate waste circulation. This is people who have subscribed to the blog in multiple feed readers, probably serially, as they bounce from reader to reader. I wanted to stop carrying these dupes.

I’ll use myself as an example. When I started reading blogs, I used the Bloglines feedreader. When Google introduced its feedreader, I switched over to it, and then about a year or so ago, I switched to Newsgator. When I switched however I did not unsubscribe the abandoned readers from the feeds. So there are a significant number of feeds to which I am subscribed at least twice, possibly three times.

While I generally refrain from assuming that my behavior is reflective of the rest of the population, in this case, I think my pattern is pretty typical for the small 11% of the online population that uses feedreaders (Forrester data.)

How much waste is there in my old feed? A month into the cut-over, subscribers to the new Marketing Roadmaps feed are about 6% of the total number of subscribers to the old feed. Since this is totally unscientific research, we can’t make the correlation that only 6% have re-subscribed, but I will bet that it isn’t far from the truth.

What does that tell us?  I make no claim that my results are indicative of anything other than my blog and its audience.  However, my data hints that feedreader subscriber numbers are very inflated, especially for long running blogs, and may not be the best basis for evaluating a blog’s readership or creating ranking systems. If used at all, feed reader subscribers should not be weighted heavily.

Further substantiation. The number of visitors and unique visitors per month to the old TypePad site in August and September, the last two full months of its life as the active blog, and to the new site in its first full month are about the same. Traffic to the TypePad site is also falling off.  While this is all extremely unscientific and has absolutely no statistical validity, it does support my belief that the readers who read my blog on the blog is a fairly stable number, and most have followed over to read at the new site.

How useful is my data? What can other people extrapolate? A lot or a little I suppose, depending on how honest you want to be about how many readers are actually, regularly reading your blogs. It’s up to you.

For myself,  I have a great deal of confidence that I truly know how many regular readers Marketing Roadmaps has. Thanks for sticking with me. You know who you are