John Lovett and Jeremiah Owyang pitch their work as a starting point – “a foundation for effectively measuring social marketing using an objective-based methodology”.

At the core of their social marketing analytics framework is the business objective, be it fostering dialogue, promoting advocacy, facilitating support or spurring innovation, with each objective having their own set of key performance indicators (KPI).

In the case of ‘dialogue’, Lovett and Owyang recommend measuring share of voice, audience engagement and conversation reach, while efforts to encourage innovation can be aided through the analysis of topic trends, sentiment ratios and the impact of ideas in terms of their occurrences in conversations.

Lovett and Owyang go on to recommend particular social media research suppliers for each KPI.

“There is currently no single vendor that can effectively measure all aspects of social media,” they say. “Most [companies] use an amalgamation of commercial solutions geared for capturing social buzz, free tools offering limited information and a whole lot of manual intervention for aggregating and analysing social media data. Don’t expect this to change in the near-term.”

The report is available to download here.

• In their report, Lovett and Owyang note that “social marketing and media monitoring vendors are emerging at an astounding rate”. As if to prove the point, today brings news of two new market entrants.

The first is Famecount, which provides aggregate measures of online popularity across multiple social media platforms. The service uses API data from Twitter, YouTube and Facebook Connect to track and then organise “social media stars” by country and category.

Next up is SocialEyez, which has partnered with Alterian to adapt its SM2 technology for use in the Arab-language market. “The challenging process of incorporating support of Arab text into SM2 is complete, and we will shortly be featuring an Arabic sentiment analysis tool along with its Arabic interface,” said Alterian sales director Ben Jackson. SocialEyez is a division of Media Watch Middle East.