In any case, most research agencies (disclosure, I work for one) will tell you that what matters are the objectives you’ve set for yourself, whatever medium you are working with (offline or online). Indeed, influencing public opinion within the context of public policy issues may have different meanings to different advocacy groups. The Tobacco industry may be satisfied with the fact that some research report arguing tobacco may not be primarily responsible for lung cancers made its way to a limited number of highly visible medical blogs or other social websites. However, health adovcacy groups might not rest until their message “tobacco kills” has been hammered in all the online social spaces favoured by teenagers.

It all boils down to setting concrete and measurable objectives before your campaign starts. Then, all you often have to measure are proxy metrics as the one that counts most, i.e. the evolution of each concerned / targeted individual’s mindset, is often hard to grasp, even with traditional techniques such as opinion surveys. Anyhow, before you wonder whether your action made some impact on your target group, you have to make sure the issue was brought to their attention, through proxies…

Anthony Hamelle

After spending 15 years as a consultant working with organizations to shift online policy debates, I reached the conclusion that the lack of real measurements has led organizations to both invest in measurable tactics that have no pubic policy impact (i.e. - sending email to Congressional offices) and continue to focus their resources on less efficient offline tactics.

In regard to measuring the impact on the public discussion, their is an emerging field (NOTE - I now work for one of the companies in this new filed - http://www.morningside-analytics.com/ ) growing out of academic work on social networks to quantify the movement of issues throughout the blogosphere.

Measuring the direct impact of issues that are moving through personal email and social networking sites remains an obstacle. However, the growth of publicly accessible blogs provides a barometer of conversations (online and off) that are happening and therefore provides a way to measure the impact of social media campaigns.

While measuring posts on top level blogs or total links can provide some insight, looking closer at how the issue is then moving and shaping the debate can provide real comparative data on the success of the effort.

But, great post - I’ve added to the social media metrics media
http://socialmediametrics.wikispaces.com

I’m glad to finally see some nonprofit and public policy perspective on social media roi and metrics …

It’s not social media, per se, but I always find the M+R E-Benchmarks study valuable when discussing this topic, because 1) you see how low an average response rate can go; and 2) it contains arguments about how to evaluate user engagement that you might not have thought about before when trying to persuade the skeptics.