Meet the Queen of Social Media Measurement: KD Paine

As I mentioned in my post about BlogPotomac, I wanted to reserve a post specifically to talk about KD Paine, one of the best speakers at the conference. She has a company which has been helping organizations learn how to measure and monitor social media for over a decade - since before there existed the term "social media"! She has written a book on the subject, Measuring Public Relationships -- The Data-Driven Communicator's Guide to Success.

She also has a blog. Here are a couple of posts from it that I thought you might find interesting:

- In The M Word in Social Media, she describes how this is, per Jeremiah Owyang, the year of measurement. BUT, it's not just about measuring sales.

"...most organizations can't articulate what it is that they want to achieve. So my suggestion is pick one:
1. Improve relationships with my customers/employees (Metric: Improvement in Relationship Scores)
2. Generate traffic to a web site (Metric: Web Analytic improvement)
3. Persuade someone to do something (Metric: Increased donations, pledges etc.)"

- Here's her summary of her Blogpotomac presentation. You'll see why I thought it was packed full of good stuff.

- I really like this - KD proposes a new un-standard for social media measurement. "There can be no standard because there is no standard goal for "communications." Yes, there may have been a standard way to count eyeballs in print and television, (and the accuracy of that can be debated) but just reaching eyeballs is seldom the goal for a good strategic communications program, and the goal always drives the selection of your measurement tool."

This lady is cool, is a really engaging speaker, and is just the kind of person the association industry needs to bridge the gap and show us the way.

Here's a video of her being interviewed by Shel Israel on FastCompany.TV. I'll post this over on PITV too for completeness.