How should you measure the value of social media? Here's a great answer from Pat LaPointe, a marketing metrics expert, "WHY are you doing them in the first place? If you can't answer that, you're wasting your time and the company's money….
…if you can't describe in two sentences or less (no semi-colons) WHAT you hope to gain through use of social media, then WHY are you doing it?"
Pat's blog entry in Online Metrics Insider has a great framework for working the thinking needed to define the "whats." I'll be adapting this framework for news orgs for my talk at the Knight Digital Media Center News Leadership seminar on social media.
News Numbers 