Working with What You Find

After you start playing around with different basic metrics and third-party tools, you’re probably starting to notice data coming in — data that you now have to sort and understand. In fact, piles and piles of data are out there to sort and sift through. How do you know where to start digging in?

The simplest way to begin is to create a spreadsheet to track each goal you have. That way, you can track your successes and make use of data-sorting, web-saving, and annotating tools like Evernote (http://evernote.com ) and other tools like it to start sorting your incoming feeds. Use your browser bookmarks and folders to keep online tools straight.

If I have to have you choose between a document, which most folks are familiar and comfortable with, and a spreadsheet for tracking your goals, I’d tell you to go with a spreadsheet. Some people already use them extensively, and that’s great! For those of you who don’t use them yet because they seem too “math-y” or because you think you might not “do it right,” it’s high time you got comfortable with them. Using your goals is a good start.

To get started tracking your goals in spreadsheets, follow these steps:

1. Title the spreadsheet with your goal or objective for your social interaction for the coming week.

2. Make a column for each of the sites you want to engage (Twitter, Facebook, and so on).

3. Go to the various services described earlier in this chapter and start keying in your goal as the metric to track.

For these steps here, assume that brand awareness is your goal. Brand awareness is your brand’s online presence, and its general level of client, peer, and fan engagement are the metrics you track.

4. Do your vanity search and plug the response you get into your spreadsheet.

Make sure that you keep track of the dates you do this search. (If you’re unfamiliar with a vanity search, see Chapter 1.) If you haven’t ever tracked the results of any of these services, you’re creating your baseline. Dating the results, or creating a new spreadsheet tab for each week, helps you compare the metrics in a simple way across time. If you’re handy with Excel or Google Spreadsheet formulas, you can pull your data into graphs and pivot tables as you go, creating dynamic results tracking.

5. Choose another platform, such as Twitter, and do some metrics hunting for your brand and handle using the search feature and other tools specific to those sites or platforms.

For example, if you’re tracking Twitter, use the Twitter-related tools listed in the earlier section on Twitter.

6. Track the results in your spreadsheet for each platform.

How engaged are the people in your network? Are they ignoring you or talking to you and sharing or interacting with you online?

For purposes of your baseline, for each service, track the number of your followers, subscribers, friends, circlers, or fans, along with the number of people you follow, fan, subscribe to, or circle. Record these values in your spreadsheet.

Although this metric is the least important overall in terms of depth of information, it does provide a quick way to gauge brand growth over time.

Congratulations! You’ve just made your first basic metrics tracking spreadsheet.

As you get better at tracking metrics, you’ll find that you’ll leave behind a lot of these simple metrics services in favor of automating your spreadsheets using more advanced tools. Starting here, however, gives you the practice you need to successfully fine-tune your results and understand what you’re seeing.

By the time you finish this book, you won’t much need those simple metrics services that track only one thing. (You need to drop by only once in a while, to take the measure of how your brand or goals are perceived by folks who haven’t gotten more advanced or who don’t know you can get more advanced.)

If you’re a whiz at databases and think spreadsheets are old hat, you can use the spreadsheet techniques described here to build brand metrics databases on your own.