The first article I found was "Study: Measuring social media word of mouth drives restaurant traffic". This article was very interesting. In the article they talk about how restaurant operators know there is a correlation between successful social media marketing and ROI, but they have a hard time determining exact ways of figuring it out. They know word of mouth is what helps to make restaurants successful and they know using social media helps WOM, but they are not entirely sure how to interpret the data.
The second article I found was "Tips from Canadian Startup Founders on Measuring Social Media Success". In this article there are many tips for measuring social media marketing success. One CEO states, "It's all trial & error at the end of the day", and I believe to a large extent that is right on the money. It sounds to me like there are no hard and fast rules to measuring the success of social media marketing because this is something that is always changing and there's no set way to really measure it yet. I seems there will be many different ways to measure the success of social media marketing depending on the different kinds of businesses.
The third article I found was "The Problem With Measuring Digital Influence". This is an interesting article. They bring up a lot of different problems with measuring digital influence on businesses. They also propose ways to optimize data interpretation.
My understanding of measuring social media marketing is that it is a very new practice. There are different ways to measure depending on what type of business you are looking at. People have come up with different ways to try and measure the effects of social media marketing, but there is no exact science in place as of yet. There are too many other determining factors involved to get a clear, concise measurement of the data for any one company. As one CEO said, "It's all trial & error at the end of the day". I'm sure in the coming years there will be developments in this field as research into these questions continues and before we know it there will be a set of standards to measure the success by.
