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If you’re worried about doing social media, you’re probably doing it wrong. Social media is not a goal. It’s a means to achieving goals you have probably always had as a business. 

WebProNews recently spoke with Lee Odden of Top Rank Online Marketing about effectively utilizing channels that are available to you, and simply being social, rather than just doing social. 

"Consumers expect more in the buying cycle," says Odden. "It’s no longer a matter of just checking inventory and going, ‘Ok, I’ll take one.’ They’re searching. They’re asking recommendations of friends and reading reviews, and maybe they finally buy, and maybe they share the fact that they bought with their friends."

"So customers are expecting more, but as a marketer, giving more isn’t better," he says. "Being better is better – meaning a better experience. The idea is a better experience. It’s not a matter of quantity. It’s a matter of quality. Enhancing the customer experience and how they discover you, how they interact with you, making it easy for them to share that whole thing…"

"And then post customer marketing also," he adds. "Using social media is pretty critical I think, and a lot of folks aren’t doing that. They’re all focused on the top of the funnel, but they’re not focused on creating relationships and community and after-the-sale kinds of engagement, which is all content that can be optimized for search."

If you’re trying to find ways to use social media, perhaps you should look at the ways you’re using other channels, and go from there. At least see which of these things are working, and which are not, and which of those that are can be accomplished at the same level, or probably a greater level using social channels. 

"People understand things in terms of what they already know," explains Odden. "So we look at social media channels, and we go, ‘Wow, that’s just like other marketing channels.’ So they look at it purely as marketing. One of the things I like to tell people asking about measuring ROI of social media is how do you measure ROI having a phone system in your company?"

"A communication platform is what it is, and it can accomplish many different objectives," he continues. "Social media is no different. If you have a situation where you want to use social channels to facilitate sales, then yeah, you could do that, but you can also engage customers in terms of a customer service situation or you can use it for public relations/media relations purposes."

"Anything, when you’re talking about word-of-mouth, when you can use technology to facilitate word-of-mouth, that’s essentially what social media is," he adds.

Businesses are constantly trying to measure the ROI of social media, but the ROI will come from the products that being social brings your business – not necessarily just from the social channel itself. 

"As more companies shift from doing social to being social, we’ll see a lot more ROI," says Odden. "We’ll actually see a lot more business outcomes achieved vs. folks just counting fans/friends/followers and so forth."

Odden talked a bit about some things companies are missing the mark on – mistake that are being made. "Not listening, not paying attention, not monitoring brand terms, not monitoring for what employees are doing that sort of thing. Certainly not monitoring for customer service issues. Those are all opportunities."

"IBM had a case study in eMarketer that cited they are uncovering millions of dollars in leads simply by having volunteers they call seekers that are using clever search queries on social sites, looking for people talking about their products or even competitors, and then jumping in and engaging in conversation. I think that’s low-hanging fruit really…just the notion of listening."

"Through that listening, you can identify where people are talking about stuff that’s important to your buying cycle..that’s important to your prospects that you’re looking for," says Odden. 

"I think another no-no is the notion of fragmented or disconnected or siloed social media efforts within a company," he adds. "This is more common in a large company where let’s say marketing goes and starts a blog, and they start a Facebook Page. Then Public Relations goes and starts one too, and they never talk to each other."

"It’s confusing in that one brand interaction is a particular way," he continues. "Or when fans create a social destination about a brand and the brand doesn’t recognize that or participate. Especially if they go in and go, ‘look, you’re not official, so we’re going to shut you down.’ No. No. No. Why would you do that? Be like Coke and go, ‘Wow, you guys are doing a fantastic job. Rock on. Here’s more resources for you to keep doing what you’re doing.’"

There’s nothing social about treating your fans like crap. If anything, that’s antisocial. 

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Raj Kadam is the CEO and Co-founder of Viralheat Inc., a social media analytics firm focused on delivering detailed social media analytics to major brands and agencies world-wide.

Today, you would be hard-pressed to find a marketer who’s not buried in a mountain of data.  The average marketing pro’s data sources include the usual web variety –- inbound analytics, e-mail marketing, open rates, SEO, and more.

And then there is the ever-expanding social media universe, where standbys like Facebook and YouTube generate an ever-increasing volume of data.  And just to make it a bit more fun, there is a constant barrage of new categories and services that generate even more information, and on grand scales — Google Buzz being only the latest example.

But just because there’s a raging river of marketing data available doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile to track it all. Here are a few tips for honing in on what’s relevant to your marketing strategy.

The Challenge of Extracting the Most Value

Marketers have gotten wiser during the turbulent economy. They know that they need to demonstrate their value the same way that the sales department does, or else their budgets, and possibly their jobs, will be far less secure. The CMO position has been known to have the shortest expected tenure of any in the C-suite.

The first crucial steps in demonstrating that value were to acquire the data and set the necessary systems in place. Now they’re struggling to find a way to harness that data — to use the scientific and the empirical in service of what matters even more: Actionability. That is, knowing how and when to engage with the right people and what the value of each interaction is.

The challenge is no longer merely acquiring the data from that raging river; it’s understanding the data, bending the data to your will, taking action on it and, above all, making data come alive in the boardroom.

Taking the Right Measurements

We can talk all day about the importance of analytics and measurement, but the real question is whether or not you’re measuring the right things for the right reasons.

The best measurement efforts start with clear goals. You need to have a framework that identifies exactly what you’re trying to measure.  Here are a few questions you should ask yourself to help focus in on what you should really be measuring:

Why do you have a social media function at your company?

Customer Service?

Marketing/PR?

SEO?

Product development/support?

Grassroots marketing?

Sales?

What social sites/platforms are most relevant to your community/customers?

Who are you trying to reach with your program?  Customers? Influencers?

Once you are clear on why you’re doing this in the first place, you can start thinking about what metrics and analytics matter most to you.  You don’t want to spend your time looking at metrics that indicate how well an influencer relations program is going when your focus is all about customer service.

Tie Your Analytics to Your Intent

Here are some examples of readily available analytics that tie back to specific intents of a social media program.  Some of them apply to many different types of programs, but the point is to start thinking about which ones are most relevant to your specific goals.

Engagement: If you are using social media to drive sales, and your product requires true engagement, multiple conversations and a strong relationship to get someone to a purchasing decision, then you should be paying attention to data that indicates high engagement.  Track your ratio of organic conversation versus mentions that are just links or simple participation like retweets on Twitter.

Traffic: If you’re a big brand and creating a lot of chatter across the web, do you know the traffic levels of the sites where you are engaging?  Your efforts should be focused on finding the stuff that drives the most results for your business. If you’re a major brand, chances are there is more ROI when you focus your efforts on higher-traffic sites.

Sentiment: How do people feel about your product or service?  For some brands, social media is a lot like a real-time focus group.  Sentiment should be incredibly important to you if you have chosen to strategically use social media as a way to inform your product development priorities.  If people are generally positive or negative about a product or new feature, there should be a feedback loop to the development team.

Viral Analysis: What is going viral for your product or brand and why? You want to see what kinds of trends are emerging for your product or service in real-time, and you should have a good sense of why they managed to go spread so far, so fast. This should be a measurement priority for businesses that know word-of-mouth and grassroots marketing is a big driver of sales for their products.

Influencer Tracking: Are you a relatively new company, or an entirely new type of product?  If you’re targeting early adopters and influencers for credibility, then you should know at any given moment who your biggest influencers are, what they’re saying and where they are talking about you.

As I mentioned, many of these metrics will apply to several types of social media programs.  But the trick is to have the discipline to determine which analytics are critical to your social media program, and use them accordingly to take action.

Conclusion

The goal of social marketing analytics is to be able to track the impact of your efforts and optimize your campaigns based on social data for maximum effect.  That means you need analytics, insights and, ultimately, action.  Knowing what the data means –- in real-time — is the next important step.  If you don’t have that, you really don’t have anything.  And if you don’t turn those insights into action, you may as well stop measuring.

For more business coverage, follow Mashable Business on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

More business resources from Mashable:

- How Data Will Impact the Way We Do Business

- 4 Ways Foursquare Can Improve Your Workplace

- Growing Your Business: 5 Tips From the Founder of Foursquare

- 5 Simple Tools for a Paperless Office

- How One Small Biz Turned Their Company Retreat Into Social Media Success

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, Daft_Lion_Studio, duckycards

Tags: business, data, MARKETING, small business, social media, social media marketing

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Ever Wish You Knew How To Use Google Adwords Pay-per-click, But Always Thought It Was Too Hard?

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Duration : 0:8:54