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So far, 20 of this fall’s 25 new network shows have aired. We’ve been tracking tweets about all 25 shows for more than two weeks and today it’s time to check in with our data and see how the shows are doing. I’m going to take my first guesses at which new shows will be cancelled this season, based on a few of our standard quantitative TweetReach metrics. A few caveats before we begin, however…

First, since these shows premiered and air at different times, these initial metrics will be somewhat biased towards the shows that began the earliest in the season. In the next few weeks, this advantage will disappear, but for now, take these numbers with a grain or two of salt. Consider them directional indicators for now. And I’m not including stats for the five shows that haven’t aired at the time of posting. Second, different networks have different audience and revenue expectations from their shows. So just because one show has a smaller reach does not mean it’s less successful than a show with a larger reach on a different network or targeted to a different audience. Finally, this week’s predictions are based on numbers only – we’ll get into the more qualitative and content-based data next week. A terrible show can still generate nearly as much conversation on Twitter as a really good one, and we’ll sort out some of those distinctions in future posts.

So, on to the predictions! I’m going to try a few different models this week to get started. I’ll update these predictions next week when we have more data.

Cancel the lowest performing show on each network, based on reach:

• ABC – Suburgatory* (14.1M)
• CBS – A Gifted Man (3.0M)
• CW – Ringer (6.0M)
• FOX – Terra Nova (16.5M)
• NBC – Free Agents (3.3M)

*ABC still has three shows yet to air, so any of them could take over the lead in this position. Also, Suburgatory premiered just last night, so it could easily catch up to its peers in the next week or two.

Cancel the overall lowest performers, based on tweet volume:

1. CW – H8R (1K tweets)
2. CBS – A Gifted Man (3K tweets)
3 (tie). CW – Ringer, NBC – Free Agents, NBC – Prime Suspect (5K tweets)
4. CBS – Unforgettable (6K tweets)
5. ABC – Suburgatory (8K tweets)

Cancel the shows with the fewest people talking about them, based on unique contributors:

1. CW – H8R (<1K)
2. CBS – A Gifted Man (2K)
3 (tie). CW – Ringer (3K), NBC – Free Agents (3K)
4. NBC – Prime Suspect (4K)
5. ABC – Suburgatory (6K)
6. NBC – Whitney (7K)

Based on these three lists, I’d consider A Gifted Man, Free Agents, and Ringer pretty sure bets for cancellation. They show up in all three categories. (I’m giving Suburgatory one more week before we count it out, since it just started yesterday and the others have had more time to generate conversation.) And it’s not looking good for H8R or Prime Suspect either.

Finally, since I’d hate to end this post without saying something about the shows that are doing well on Twitter, here’s a few stats about some of the top performing shows.

The top five shows that seem safe, based on highest reach: 

1. X Factor (37.3M)
2. New Girl (21.5M)
3. Charlie’s Angels (19.6M)
4. Revenge (17.3M)
5. Terra Nova (16.5)**

**While Terra Nova is FOX’s lowest performing show so far (it’s competing against the X Factor and New Girl), it still has a higher reach than most of the other shows.

The top five shows that seem safe, based on unique contributors: 

1. FOX – X Factor (73K)
2. FOX – New Girl (40K)
3. FOX – Terra Nova (37K)
4. ABC – Revenge (26K)
5. ABC – Pan Am (25K)

We just learned that FOX’s New Girl was picked up for a full season. Based on the tweets, that seems like a good choice. It’s also looking pretty good for NBC’s Up All Night, CW’s The Secret Circle and Hart of Dixie, and CBS’ 2 Broke Girls, but I wouldn’t count my predictive chickens before they hatch. We’ll see what the tweets can tell us after another week of these shows.

So, what do you think? Have you seen any of these shows? Do these lists ring true with your experience? Tell us which shows you think will be cancelled (or picked up) in the comments.

Until next week, happy watching!

Welcome back to This Week in Social Analytics, our continuing round-up of some of our favorite posts on social analytics, measurement, Twitter and other items that caught our eye over the past week. Enjoy, and please let us know what you think.

Measuring the value of a tweet
Bridget Carey writes about several brands using Twitter measurement to drive increases in business. Among the examples in the article is a great story of how Exposed PR, C&I Studios and their client IKEA ran a very creative promotion using an in-store “Catpture the Catalog” event to launch their 2012 Catalog. Winners were chosen based on Twitter measurements of impressions and reach. And, the traffic created by the event helped drive Saturday sales at the IKEA store to the highest level in a year.

Twitter Sharing Buttons Drive Sevenfold Increase in Tweet Links
MarketingProfs reports on a recent study by BrightEdge that shows that sites with Twitter sharing buttons are linked to on Twitter nearly seven times more often than sites that do not display tweet buttons. Still, only 53.6% of the largest 10,000 websites are displaying social sharing links or buttons on their homepages.

Digital Marketing and Measurement Model
From Avinash Kaushik, a great 5-step model for measuring the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts.

Moneyball Will Put Web Analytics on the Map
Big fans of the book, we are definitely planning on checking out the new Moneyball movie. John Lovett believes it will help catapult analytics into the mainstream. Or at least help us explain what we do to our grandmothers!

Recently, TweetReach customer Exposed PR, along with C&I Studios, ran a very creative promotion with their client IKEA. We love to highlight interesting – and successful – PR campaigns, so read on for more about this cool promotion.

In July, Exposed PR and C&I Studios teamed up with IKEA to organize an in-store scavenger hunt with an online twist. Called Capture the Catalog, this promotion pitted 11 teams against each other in a scavenger hunt at the IKEA store in Sunrise, Florida, just outside Fort Lauderdale. Teams competed to complete a set of tasks in the store, and tweeted about their achievements as they went, trying to get as many retweets as possible. The teams were competing to see who could generate the most impressions on Twitter in 90 minutes. Exposed PR used TweetReach to track these tweets and measure each team’s impressions. They generated more than 8 million impressions in just an hour and half, reaching more than 700,000 unique Twitter accounts!

We talked to Sara Shake of Exposed PR, one of the creators of this promotion, to understand more about where this clever idea came from and how everything went.

First, tell us a little about the IKEA Capture the Catalog Tournament. What was the goal of this promotion?

The goal of the Ikea promotion was to launch their 2012 Catalog. As a company, Ikea has a few different times throughout the year that are extremely important, and their catalog launch is the biggest. We wanted a creative way to get the word out that didn’t include the typical Media Day festivities that they had done in the past.

How did you come up with the idea for this promotion?

I share my office with a company called C&I Studios. It’s not unusual for us at the end of the day to start speaking in terms of “What If.” Once we’ve completed all the work for the day, we always try to spend sometime just brainstorming without the limitations of the clients that we currently service. We don’t think about location or budget, we just bounce ideas until something sticks. We call these ideas our 5 O’Clock Miracles.

This idea came largely from my frequent frustration with traditional media… We (Joshua Miller from C&I Studios and I) thought there has to be a better way to get the word out, without the help of traditional media. Then we thought about how competition drives people. The original concept was Capture the Flag (which is where Capture the Catalog came from), but it evolved into a scavenger hunt. We knew we needed a forward-thinking brand to latch onto the idea…and this was just about the time that you started hearing about Ikea letting the cats loose in Sweden. We said “We need a brand like Ikea!” We were lucky enough to have one in the neighborhood, so we just called.

How did you decide who won?

The first-place winner was the team with the highest number of impressions of their unique hash tag during the 90-minute scavenger hunt.

What role did TweetReach play in this promotion?

TweetReach was instrumental in the Capture the Catalog tournament. We were able to set up a Tracker to live-track every team’s (there were 11) hashtag throughout the tournament. This way we were able to make announcements like, “So and so is in the lead with 350,000 impressions.” We also announced every time that we reached another million impressions of the combined hashtags. We took snapshot reports for each hashtag at the end of the tournament and that’s how we determined the winner.

What would you change for next time?

We would just find a way to make it bigger and better.

What went well? Was there anything you were particularly proud of?

We were really proud of the teams; they went all out. It was also an amazing experience to work with Ikea as a brand. They believed and bought into the vision, and took it to an entirely different level. From the graphics and signage they produced, to the staff that manned each clue, to the prize that they provided to our winners, it was totally refreshing to work with a brand that didn’t cut a single corner. They were exceptionally thoughtful down to the last detail.

What did IKEA think?

They loved it! In a Miami Herald article about the event, Chantal Nichtawitz, marking manager at Ikea Sunrise, said, “We were certain that the event drove traffic to the store. That Saturday we had one of the biggest Saturdays we’ve seen in over a calendar year.”

Do you have any recommendations or tips for someone running their own promotion or contest on Twitter?

The key is finding the right brand and participants.

You can follow Exposed PR, C&I Studios, and the IKEA Sunrise store on Twitter.

At TweetReach, we’ve tracked a lot of tweets about television, from special events like the Oscars, the Golden Globes and the Super Bowl, to regular weekly episodes of many of your favorite shows. That’s because we (and our customers) know that Twitter can tell us a lot about what an audience thinks about a show, from how much viewers tweet about a show, to when they tweet about it, to what they actually tweet about. There’s a lot we can learn about a TV program’s success just by analyzing the tweets about it.

So we thought it would be fun to track this fall’s 25 new shows on the five big broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, CW, FOX, NBC) to see what Twitter thinks about them. But we’re not content to just rank Twitter’s favorite shows. Oh no. Inspired by the New York Times’ Fall TV Season Ratings Pool and based on Twitter chatter, we’re going to predict what new fall shows will be canceled.

Want to play along? Leave your predictions in the comments. Which new shows do you think will be canceled? Or, even better, which new shows do you wish they’d cancel?

We’ll be posting throughout the fall with our updates, predictions and conclusions (and maybe we’ll even feature some special guests along the way!). For reference, here’s a list of the new fall shows, ordered by network.

ABC

• Charlie’s Angels
• Last Man Standing
• Man Up
• Once Upon a Time
• Pan Am
• Revenge
• Suburgatory

CBS

• 2 Broke Girls
• A Gifted Man
• How to Be a Gentleman
• Person of Internet
• Unforgettable

CW

• H8R
• Hart of Dixie
• Ringer
• The Secret Circle

FOX

• New Girl
• Terra Nova
• X Factor

NBC

• Free Agents
• Grimm
• Prime Suspect
• The Playboy Club
• Up All Night
• Whitney

Welcome back to TakeFive with TweetReach, our ongoing interview series with notable members of the social media analytics and measurement community. This week we’re happy to welcome Adam Price, co-founder of Speak Social, an Austin, Texas-based company that handles all aspects of social media marketing for brands.

TweetReach: Welcome Adam! Let’s start with talking about how you got started using social media. Can you describe your first “ah-ha” moment?

Adam Price: I come from an SEO background. My “ah-ha” moment happened while I was running analytics on one of my SEO clients. I noticed that a competitor’s Facebook page ranked above my optimized site. This site had massive amounts of SEO content and great back-links, yet we were suddenly second to an un-optimized Facebook profile. That planted a seed that I couldn’t get out of my head. I started researching social media non-stop and realized that it is the future of search. I understood then that social media will become the center of every marketing strategy going forward. I want to be a part of that.

TweetReach: How important was measurement in your initial strategy and how has that evolved?

Adam Price: Measurement is critical. The early problem in social media was that most books treated ROI like it didn’t exist. Most of the talking points around tracking and measuring ROI centered on why analytics didn’t matter, and how to refocus the conversation. I had more luck focusing on enterprise level companies who treated ROI as the central issue. At that level, they can’t just hide behind marketing fluff. You have to show hard data.

Today, tools to track social media success are booming as an ancillary business to social media marketing. Initially I pitched tracking ROI of our campaigns as my differentiator over the competition. Very few people were doing it. The social media marketers I looked up to were focusing on analytics from the beginning, following the “If you can’t track it, it doesn’t exist” model. It was a huge learning curve to get my head around how it related to the bottom line, and we continue to work on it. I learned early that time was a big factor of every campaign. Social media marketing specifically takes time before you can show results. The client must accept limited results in the first months. The clients that stick with it see results once the infrastructure is in place.

TweetReach: Does size matter? David Armano has written about the importance of topical influence. What do you think? How important is the size of someone’s social graph vs. their influence in a particular topical area?

Adam Price: David has it right, but this one is touchy. Overall, I would say a social graph size has little use to a client’s bottom line, but that’s not always the case. We represent professional athletes and models, and to them raw numbers mean quite a lot.

One of our most successful nonprofit campaigns started with a Twitter account of only 200 followers, but they were the right 200. If I had a restaurant, I would rather have one Paul Barron as a follower than 1,000 unassociated followers. This is nothing new of course; influencer marketing is old hat. The truly interesting thing is how many of the walls between a brand and the influencers are knocked down by social media. Those walls will rebuild, but until they do, we have a unique opportunity to reach out to anyone.

TweetReach: Do you have any examples of how analytics have helped you adjust or improve your social media activities? Has this ever happened in the middle of a campaign?

Adam Price: Absolutely, we obsessively track analytics. It’s important to develop social media measurement strategies based on business objective KPIs. There is a wealth of monitoring data available, but without a focused strategy, the data will not effectively develop and direct the campaign. At some level, we are always adjusting and tweaking. If our blogs get fewer views than expected, we revamp. If our Twitter reach is smaller than expected, we readjust. We never based measurements off the raw number of Twitter followers and Facebook likes. Those metrics were never a sound justification for social media marketing.

TweetReach: Is ROI for Twitter campaigns achievable? There a many different ways to measure activity, but how do your gauge your success, or help your clients do the same? What’s missing from the equation?

Adam Price: ROI for Twitter is absolutely achievable. Twitter requires you to be specific. You have to know who your audience is, and if you are reaching them. You need to create trackable links that you tweet, then measure who clicks those links. We gauge our client milestones upfront, and then work to meet them. The goals are tailored to the client. The question is not is ROI achievable, but is it achievable with this client?

When a potential client asks me to define the ROI of social media, I start by asking them how they track ROI on their current marketing strategies. What’s missing most times is the client’s holistic understanding of their business. You need to be crystal clear on where you are starting from with a campaign and where you are going. The best clients know their business inside and out. When you bring a tool like Twitter into the equation with one of these clients, it’s not hard to work together to gauge success.

TweetReach: Any social media pet peeves? What practices irritate you the most when you look at the state of the industry?

Adam Price: I think the thing that annoys me the most is the all too common perception that understanding social media channels directly equates to understanding social media marketing. We have a diverse staff of people on our team each who have different specialties, and we did that in a very premeditated way. Social media cannot be encompassed solely in Facebook. A true social media marketing strategy has multiple elements that have to each be accountable. I don’t mean to say that social media marketing is unapproachable or you have to have a team to have success, but right now there is a tendency to grab an intern who has a thousand friends on Facebook and make her your “social media solution.” The results are ineffective, at best, and reflect poorly on our growing industry.

Social media marketing is like anything else, you succeed by taking the time to gain knowledge before you begin. The great thing about the social media community is that they are so motivated to share what they know. You don’t have look very hard to find the information and help you need when you are just starting out.

Adam Price is a co-founder of Speak Social, an Austin, Texas-based company that handles all aspects of social media marketing for brands. Speak Social represents businesses, nonprofits, athletes and personalities. Adam strives to develop and improve the social media campaign process, which can close the gap between brands and the people that use them. His continued study of online media and marketing allows him to construct strategies that serve the client’s message and goals.

Hello again from This Week in Social Analytics, our ongoing summary of some of our favorite posts from the week in the world of measurement, analytics and social media. Enjoy!

Advertisers Begin to Look Beyond Facebook and Twitter
Recent research from The Pivot Conference and Brian Solis found that a majority of marketers are advertising on social media networks and most are satisfied with their results so far. Not surprisingly, the research found that future consumer online behavior will influence advertising on social media networks.

Report: The Rise of the Social Advertising
Brian Solis chimes in on the social media advertising report and provides a ton of great detail on the findings. As consumers spend more time on social networks, it is not surprising that brands are focusing advertising efforts there, but the rules for best practices are still being written in this relatively new space.

11 ways to measure the value of social media
Stefan Tornquist at Econsultancy discusses several ways to measure data from social media and turn it into insights and recommendations that can be acted upon to improve the business.

PR Primer: RIP to AVE?
Ogilvy PR has announced they will permanently abandon their use of Advertising Equivalent Value (AVE) to measure the effectiveness of earned media. Measurement pros rejoice.

Extreme tweets: How ESPN’s X Games social strategy paid off
In case you missed it, we posted results of an in depth analysis we did with ESPN on Twitter activity during the recent X Games. ESPN set as a goal going into the X Games to make the event as social as possible. And the analysis enabled them to better understand the effectiveness of the strategy and the engagement around the events.

Welcome back to TakeFive with TweetReach, our ongoing interview series with notable members of the social media analytics and measurement community.

This week we’re happy to welcome Holly Homer, writer of June Cleaver Nirvana, founding partner at Business 2 Blogger, and operator of several websites devoted to her home in Texas, including the popular She is Dallas.

TweetReach: Welcome Holly! Let’s start with talking about how you got started using social media. Can you describe your first “ah-ha” moment?

Holly Homer: I had been blogging for a year or so when Twitter started to become popular among bloggers, but I was Twitter-resistant. I was happily using Plurk. Plurk was great because it was similar to Twitter, but the comments nested so you could follow a full conversation. The Plurk timeline showed a conversation topic and how many people had responded below. I was mocking my friends on Twitter and lamenting how random and pointless Twitter was when one of them said, “Who cares how great Plurk is if everyone is on Twitter.” That was the moment I realized that the key to social media was the social part. I got over my Twitter issues and have grown to find its random nature charming.

TweetReach: How important was measurement in your initial strategy and how has that evolved?

Holly Homer: Initially, I had no strategy. I am a mom blogger. I am posting pictures of my kids and telling silly suburban stories. As my readership grew, I started getting approached by others to write about something on their agenda. Back then, blogging was (and is now to a lesser degree) in no-man’s-land. No one wanted to pay for me to do things because it was unchartered territory, but they still wanted me to do things… just for free. I figured out really quickly that if I ever expected to be paid for blogging, I was going to have to figure out how to prove my worth. I started learning about SEO, Google Analytics, StumbleUpon, Alexa, Twitter and Facebook to help define my sphere of influence.

As my sphere of influence grew, I was getting more and more email pitches. Some mornings I would wake up to an inbox with 5 or 6 new ways I could write about a company in exchange for a product or service. None of these pitches fit my blog, but that didn’t mean they weren’t good opportunities for another blogger so I passed them on to my blogging friends. This went on for a few months and I thought, “Someone needs to organize all this!”. That is when I had the idea for Business 2 Blogger. I bought the URL and sat on it for nearly a year as I tried to avoid taking on another project. In the meantime, I found some partners and in February of 2010 we launched the site that matches companies with bloggers. It is based on the HARO model where businesses tell us what type of bloggers they need and how many and we pass that information on in an email to our blogger members. The interested bloggers “apply” for the opportunity and a match is made.

The information I had learned about how to justify my own worth was now being used to help other bloggers find writing opportunities. I am a big believer in online karma.

TweetReach: What metrics are most important for your job and/or your company?

Holly Homer: Each and every campaign we run at Business 2 Blogger is different. People are looking for different things for different reasons, but all of them have to justify a budget. The better the match, the more effective the message will be within a sphere of influence. BUT we still have to define a sphere of influence. In campaign responses, bloggers self-report traffic but in all of our paid campaigns, we verify with Alexa ranking, Compete score, Twitter metrics, Facebook likes and Klout to try and achieve the most objective picture of actual influence.

When I manage a blogger campaign, my weekly reports include URLs of blog posts written about my client and TweetReach numbers surrounding the promotion’s keywords, the client’s Twitter profile and any related hashtags. I am in LOVE with TweetReach trackers. I buy extra trackers like I buy shoes – a girl needs one for every occasion! Clients appreciate the numbers (and fancy graphs), but it is extremely helpful to me in finding those bloggers who go the extra mile. The extra mile isn’t exclusive to Twitter and often the people at the top of my TweetReach report are also the bloggers who tagged several extra times on Facebook or wrote an extra blog post. They can’t help it and they are the people you want on your next promotion.

TweetReach: Does size matter? David Armano has written about the importance of topical influence. What do you think? How important is the size of someone’s social graph vs. their influence in a particular topical area?

Holly Homer: Size TOTALLY matters. Social media influence is about influence. To influence there needs to be an audience. I hear people claim that they have a “small, but engaged audience”. Just because I have a large number of followers doesn’t mean I don’t have an “engaged” core. This argument is easily won by a TweetReach report. Let’s leave out number of impressions for argument sake and look at number of retweets, recruitment of others to a conversation and number of responses. I will take the blogger with the 5,000 followers almost every time. The fact that someone HAS 5,000 followers shows a serious level of engagement.

TweetReach: Any social media pet peeves? What practices irritate you the most when you look at the state of the industry?

Holly Homer: UGH. I take poor social media skills personally and feel compelled to gently correct. Bad Twitter affects us all. Take the example of the auto-direct message. The fact that 80% (my guess) of people on Twitter now send one out when I follow them has rendered the Twitter DM useless. Who wants to wade through all that spam willingly? People forget that there are OTHER people on the other end of Twitter. Twitter is like a huge networking cocktail party. Introduce yourself, shake a few hands, listen to a few stories and skip the hard sell.

TweetReach: Great advice. Thanks, Holly!

Holly Homer writes June Cleaver Nirvana, runs several websites devoted to her home in Texas including She is Dallas, and is a founding partner at Business 2 Blogger. She is the mom of three boys who occasionally slips away to the nearest casino for a poker tournament. Follow her on Twitter as @Texasholly.

Welcome back to This Week in Social Analytics, our ongoing summary of some of our favorite posts from the past week in the world of measurement, analytics and social media. Enjoy!

Influencers
Chris Brogan suggests that marketers should stop worrying about how their online influence is scored and start using the social capital they have to build and nurture relationships with the people that really matter to whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish online.

Brand Measurement: Analytics & Metrics for Branding Campaigns
An oldie but goodie from Avinash Kaushik where he outlines seven potential outcomes of online branding campaigns and the metrics you can use to measure them.

The Single Answer to Every PR Measurement Question
Katie Delahaye Paine hosts a Q&A session on the ragan.com site where she shares the most important answer to PR measurement questions (hint: business impact matters).

Marketing Metrics that Matter to Your CEO
Barbra Gago of Left Brain posts on the HubSpot blog about the metrics that CEOs care about and gives tips for marketers who need to manage expectations up the chain.

5 Metrics to Track on Twitter
So what should you measure on Twitter? Tara Coomans outlines her top five metrics to track when measuring the impact of your engagement and campaigns.

Welcome back to TakeFive with TweetReach, our ongoing interview series with notable members of the social media analytics and measurement community. This week we’re delighted to welcome Laura Beck, Founder of stripedshirt.com and a 20-year PR professional, where she has consistently focused her energy on helping create awareness and buzz for early stage technology companies.

TweetReach: Welcome Laura! Let’s start with talking about how you got started using social media. Can you describe you first “ah-ha” moment?

Laura Beck: I’ve been on LinkedIn since mid-2008, and always have and continue to think of that as more my online rolodex; my contacts database. But, I got hooked on Facebook early, and hard, and it’s been consistent. I joined a year prior, in mid-2007 more for personal networking, keeping in touch with friends, planning high school and college reunions, seeing regular snapshots of the lives of the people I care about. But, my ah-ha moment on social media, I guess, was CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) in January 2009, when my hand was forced to join Twitter: some press friends were scolding me for not being on yet and threatened to make @fakelaurabeck and tweet away. I had to defend my Twitter turf, get my handle, and start to participate. And, while scary at first, holy cow to a fantastic way to engage with people in quick, direct ways.

TweetReach: How important was measurement in your initial strategy and how has that evolved?

Laura Beck: Initially, Twitter was play time and wasn’t about measurement at all. It was a science experiment — to see if you could reach someone, if they’d respond, if people would pass on something you tweeted. That quickly has evolved to Twitter being as critical and legit a communications channel and an information channel as blogs, online publications, even print publications. So along those lines, when you are doing public relations these days — for a client or for yourself — you best know the impact of every hit, every mention. That includes Twitter, blogs, even LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr — IF you could measure all these, and figure out the impact, the reach.

TweetReach: Let’s talk about consistency in measurement. Agencies and marketers have had to use a variety of tools and metrics to analyze the performance of their social media efforts, resulting in inconsistent results. How important is the ability to measure and report on social media results in a consistent way to you and your clients?

Laura Beck: Holy cow, it’s the holy grail. Even being able to measure and report at all with some sort of metrics, even if inconsistent, not apples to apples. Anything at all is something. We’ve been talking about this for years — and now it’s 20 years later. We’ve never been able to crack the code, get beyond “ad equivalency” or circulation as a basis for value, for the worth of a hit or a mention. And those approaches have been archaic for print publications for years, let alone online outlets, let alone blogs, let alone a tweet. This is the holy grail, but no one’s found the cup yet.

TweetReach: Olivier Blanchard and others have written about the need to look at social media measurement in the context of a broader business measurement strategy. What do you think? Is measuring social media success useful by itself?

Laura Beck: For the past 2-3 years, I’ve considered all things social media “just another channel.” Seriously. My business always, ultimately is PUBLIC relations. Not press. It’s about reaching and influencing the publics, a company’s targets (whether customers, or partners, investors, employees, etc.) positively, and moving them to action. A blog post, a tweet, a Facebook update, a YouTube video — any of these may do the trick. They are another channel to positively reach a target. Therefore, all things social better be part of the whole marketing mix. And therefore, all things social should be measured, considered, and factored in along with all business measurement. Something social may just directly create a sale, and you can be darn sure all things social indirectly affect sales, awareness, perception of a company, a brand, an individual — positively or negatively.

TweetReach: Traditionally media success has been measured using reach, impressions, exposure. How important are these metrics when looking at social media campaigns? What else to you need to measure?

Laura Beck: I think these measures are just as important in social as in any marketing campaign. But again, holy heck are they hard to measure, quantify, and value. Overall impact is still both a volume and a value game, and hopefully we are getting to a world where it’s the value that matters -– reaching the right people, versus thousands of people where you hope something sticks with a few. So while sheer reach and overall exposure are important — blog readership, twitter followers, how many times something was retweeted — again, with social, where you can be laser-precise, I’m hoping we are getting to a place where the measure of success of a marketing campaign could be clearly tracked down to who was reached and what action they took. Literally, really measuring “conversions” versus just impressions. Whereas PR has almost always been air cover for sales, with social, we have the opportunity to be the ground team, too.

TweetReach: Let’s talk about the measurement of reach – how do you weigh the importance of the quantity of a campaign’s reach – the overall size of the potential audience – vs the quality of that reach? Both are important, but how do you help your clients understand the difference and the impact?

Laura Beck: This is what I’m getting at above, a bit. And my personal theory, at least in Twitter, is that ideally a brand wants to find, mine and engage on an ongoing basis with 100 true fans. Period. If you can find the right people with the right power of influence, and mine them (get to know them, get them to know and care about your brand), and then engage with them on an ongoing basis, have real conversations — boom — you have success. They are brand advocates, they pass on their love for your brand to their networks, and it’s genuine, and pure, and “third party.” This is what I think the future of social COULD be, and wow, would it be more valuable, time efficient, respectful to all and end a lot of the echo chamber stuff we have flying around right now with just volumes and volumes of information and the same content recycled. But, we have to all work together to prove it out, and have some case studies and examples of it working. THAT will help companies believe and take on this approach as well.

TweetReach: Thanks for your thoughts and time, Laura!

After 18+ years working for PR agencies, Laura Beck is focused on independent marketing and PR consulting as well as running her own commerce business, www.stripedshirt.com. Until May 2010, she ran the Austin Texas office of Porter Novelli for nearly 10 years, opening it at the very end of the dot com bubble in 2000 at 29 years old. Under Laura’s leadership, the office grew to staff 16 people and serviced upwards to 25 clients at a time. Laura’s focus for the office and personal passion has been largely technology start ups, working with entrepreneurs to bring their dreams to life, gain critical visibility, create positive buzz. That continues now as an independent consultant.

Prior to her 10+ years with Porter Novelli in Austin, she was with the Boston office of the agency. Before that, Laura was with Lois Paul & Partners. She began the 18-year agency stretch at Weber Group, now Weber Shandwick. Laura is a decade-long Austin Texas resident now, but her Boston roots will always run deep with love for her Boston College alma mater, and the Red Sox, so much so that one of her two little Texas-born daughters sports the middle name Fenway. You can bet all these Boston colors, and many more, are represented by stripedshirt.

There’s one question our support team gets asked more often than anything else – how far back can TweetReach reports go? And it’s no wonder we get this question all the time; it can be pretty damn confusing. How long are tweets available? Why aren’t they available for a week or more? Why does this seem to change from one day to the next?

First, a bit about how TweetReach reports work. Our snapshot reports – both the 50-tweet free report and the full $20 report – are generated from Twitter’s Search API. You type in a search query, which can consist of one or more hashtags, keywords, usernames, URLs, and so on, and then we run that search through Twitter’s Search API to find all matching tweets. So our snapshot reports are dependent upon the tweets accessible through Twitter’s Search API.

It probably goes without saying that Twitter handles a lot of data. A lot. Twitter currently processes around 200 million new tweets a day, resulting in more than 350 billion tweet deliveries every single day. By our (very rough) estimation, there have been something like 1.75 trillion unique tweets posted in the past 2.5 years. Without getting too technical, let’s just say that it’s pretty hard to keep a service of this magnitude running. Because of this scale, Twitter can’t possibly keep trillions of historical tweets accessible to anyone at any time. Which is why when you go to Twitter Search or run a TweetReach report, you’re probably only going to find a few days worth of tweets. It’s just too hard to keep any more reliably and consistently available.

One of the things we love about Twitter – or at least that we have long since learned to live with – is that it can be a bit unpredictable. It’s a huge application with hundreds of millions of accounts; there will be occasional fail whales and things are probably going to change from one day to the next. One thing we know for sure is that it will continue to get harder and harder for Twitter to make older tweets available through search. The good news is that we’ve been doing this for a long time and have a number of ways to deal with these inevitable changes.

• Every day at TweetReach, we look at hundreds of reports to understand how far back search is going on that day, and we post current search conditions on our helpdesk so you can always be up-to-date.
• We are experts at constructing search queries so we can get the most and best possible data from Twitter.
• We built our Tracker to monitor and archive your tweets so that you don’t lose them after a few days.
• We’re here to help you figure out how to find the tweets you need. When in doubt about a search or a report, ask us!

This brings us back to the most frequently asked of our FAQs – how far back can a TweetReach report go? The simplest answer is that our one-time snapshot reports – both the free and the full $20 versions – go back as far as Twitter’s Search API does. And right now, the Twitter Search API goes back a few days (the exact number varies, so check here for current conditions). The more in-depth answer is that, if we know about your event, campaign, or promotion in advance, we can use our TweetReach Pro service to track and save your tweets for weeks, months or even years. TweetReach Pro comes with Trackers, which connect to Twitter’s real-time Streaming API instead of their historical Search API. This means we can actually save your tweets on our own servers the moment they’re posted to Twitter, and then you can access them later because we’re not dependent on Twitter keeping those tweets available.

So, if you’re confused about your search results or curious about what tweets you can retroactively access, let us help you. Seriously, we’re here if you have any questions – just ask!

Photo credit: Search. by Jeffrey Beall