If you care about PR and marketing communications in the new online digital world you should check out what is happening with Social Media MeasurementCamp 08 and if you can come along and join us at the next meeting!

Thanks to the enthusiasm of Will McInnes a wide range of people (clients, PR agencies, web design agencies, consultants and digital/social media agencies - check out the list) are gathering once a month to pool their collective experiences, knowledge and contacts on all things social media. A sort of ‘best practice’ community.

At the heart is the need to better understand what has to be measured, how and with what?

We know at one level we need qualitative metrics. Just what are people saying about a our clients, their products and services? What is the tone of the conversations and what is the trajectory (more, less or the same)? Equally we need to understand quantitive metrics.  How many comments are there? More or less than the competition? Better or worse? Who is making them? On what subject areas? How influential are those commentators? What makes them influential apart from them being a customer or prospect in their own right? Which influencers are tracked and monitored by the traditional media and so become the source of stories there? Where do online media versions of press and broadcasters fit in? What about journalists who blog? How do we influence this mix of bloggers and measure the outcomes and cross-compare with other strategic communication projects?

What have companies and agencies learnt that works well and what works less well? Do we know why?

What tools exist to help the tracking and analysis of the online digital world? Can it be fully automated or has sentiment and tone to be judged by human analysis? What paid for services and tools exist? What free or low cost tools exists? Can we combine multiple measures into a single client ‘dashboard’? Can all the same measurements be used across all campaigns? What about the different analysis and measurement tools - can the same ones always be used on every campaign?

We have just started the work of answering these questions. It is work-in-progress and will take a while to reach a conclusion (or at least some conclusions) but in the meantime the wiki is the place to go to keep updated on our work and also check out the next meeting date if you want to come along. Our objective is not to search for the ultimate answer as we generally agree that different clients will need different things for different campaigns. One size will not fit all. We want the wiki to become a 'guideline resource centre'.

If you are interested then come along. The more the merrier. Remember in the new Web 2.0 era  - ‘wisdom of the crowds’. Join the MeasurementCamp 08 crowd and help improve its wisdom.