To see the results of our social media activity, we need to know the value of the resulting conversations and relationships qualitatively. For me, I used these free tools to track almost anything I want: Google Alerts, Pipes, Keotag and Compete's Search Analytics.

Free tools are good but you need to manage online reputation and keep everything
yourself whereas paid services help to facilitate the analyzing and understanding of conversations around your brand.

To see the results of our social media activity, we need to know the value of the resulting conversations and relationships qualitatively. For me, I used these free tools to track almost anything I want: Google Alerts, Pipes, Keotag and Compete's Search Analytics.

Free tools are good but you need to manage online reputation and keep everything
yourself whereas paid services help to facilitate the analyzing and understanding of conversations around your brand.

Thanks this useful information. I have some query..In the information provided above, you mentioned:
“In other words, who is actually adding your site/article/blog posts to sites like Del.icio.us, Reddit, and Stumbleupon. There are a couple of methods you can leverage to look at this metric. You can use your web analytic tool and run a click map report and see how many web visitors are clicking on the social bookmarking icons.”

Can I know how can we track the clicks on icon through web analytics? I tried to find out the click map report but could not locate it..

Well written but my question to you is, how would u measure these:

RESULTS
Quantitative – 1. number of leads generated 2. number of sales generated 3. number of new contacts made 4. revenue generated

Qualitative – 1. types of leads generated 2. types of contacts made

Isn’t it difficult or rather impossible to measure this? cause the conversion may me anytime..not necessarily on the spot or even online.

Here are some of my thoughts.

You can measure a social media campaign only after you determine the objective for the social media campaign. Influence and interaction and results are the ways in which a social media campaign can be measured. Each has quantitative and qualitative elements. Below are my initial thoughts on this subject. Please bear in mind that there are probably more to add to each category. (Help, advice, and collaboration is appreciated)

INFLUENCE
Quantitative – 1. the number of people in the network 2. the number of networks/social communities/platforms 3. the growth rate of your network

Qualitative – 1. who is in the network? 2. what is the motivation for people joining the network? 3. what ideas are discussed in the networks

INTERACTION
Quantitative – 1. the number of communication methods within a platform 2. the number of scheduled tasks(eg. messages, replies, comments, bulletins, blogs, etc)

Qualitative – 1. the types of communication being sent out 2. who are you targeting with a particular message?

RESULTS
Quantitative – 1. number of leads generated 2. number of sales generated 3. number of new contacts made 4. revenue generated

Qualitative – 1. types of leads generated 2. types of contacts made

Also, I welcome your participation in the community too if you are interested.

Respectfully,

Nelson Bruton