THE MEASUREMENT STANDARD — How's that social media working out for you? All that conversation actually getting you anywhere? It's time to step up and measure your program. (Click here for a sample social media measurement report with the kind of stats you could -- and should -- be producing.) Yep, it's a big job, but it just got a lot easier. Katie Delahaye Paine's Social Media Measurement Checklist leads you through the process, step by step. You still have to do the work, but it's a whole lot easier with a road map to show you the way...

THE MEASUREMENT STANDARD — If you're from New England, you know the expression, "Light dawns over Marblehead." Marblehead being a quaint little New England seacoast village, and "marble head" being a reference to someone's incredibly thick skull. It roughly translates into "Duh!" Which is what happened to me while sitting through the umpteenth discussion about measuring social media at the Open Government and Innovations Conference in DC last week. Don't get me wrong, it was a great conference. There were dozens of stories and case studies on how the use of social media is changing government -- making it more open and transparent, facilitating brainstorming and collaboration, speeding up response time, and generally making it easier to deal with bureaucracy. And that's when light really did dawn over this marble head: As long as we call it social media, we want to measure it the way we do all other media -- with hits, or impressions, or column inches, or AVEs, or eyeballs, or GRP, or some kind of old-fashioned metric...

MARKETING THOUGHT LEADERSHIP — Katie Paine is the founder of KD Paine & Partners and publisher of the first blog and first newsletters for marketing and communications professionals dedicated entirely to measurement and accountability. Named one of PR Week’s 2008 Power Players for her advocacy of PR measurement, Katie has been providing data and information to help communications professionals make better business decisions for over 17 years. She is a member of the Institute for Public Relations Measurement Commission, and a regular contributor to PRNews, Communications World, PR Week, Business Marketing, and New Hampshire Magazine. Her book, Measures of Success, KDPaine’s guide to measuring your public relationships (2008), is already being used as a college textbook. In this podcast, Katie tells us why the business of evaluating marketing is changing dramatically, and how marketers really can measure and evaluate social media...

Yesterday, I wrote about the difficulties of measuring a conversation, thus creating a measurement issue for PR people who use social media, a practice to which I think they have no choice in embracing. My pal KD Paine the measurement maven, has done a good job of refuting some of the issues I raised yesterday. Years ago she and I had a chasm of philosophical differences between us. Now, it's just a few silly feet of cyberspace. We both understand that the entire communications industry is in a transformational phase, and that professional PR people need to adapt to the challenge for change and the clients they serve need to understand that the rules have changed to adapt into the Conversational Era that is replacing the Broadcast Era. From my perspective--that of a recovering publicist turned social media champion--the smart PR people should embrace this new direction as a Golden Era. There are many reasons why. Here are a few...