This month’s Social Media Breakfast Fort Wayne centered on diving into the best of Blog Indiana 2011. Amber Recker, Lisa Wylie, Samantha Sawyer  and I were led by Kevin Mullett  to discover the key takeaways.

Part One – The first of a  series of posts detailing my impressions of Blog Indiana 2011.

Measure Behavior, Not Just Aggregation

Measuring what someone did is more important than the number of  your fans, followers and friends. That’s the message I took from Jay Baer’s  keynote address.

Congrats, you have 10,000 twitter followers. Are you collecting or converting? Collecting isn’t action.  Converting your followers to take action moves you closer to the goal. That’s why it’s key to measure behavior.

Trying to raise awareness? Start measuring behavior by tracking  what are people saying.”  Socialmention.com  is a simple tool that gives you insight to social mention sentiment. More than aggregating  the number of mentions, it analyzes the attitude of the message. Perfect? No. Helpful? Yes!

Measure the sentiment of the messaging - Socialmention.com

Include social media activities and results in your marketing performance timeline to track your metrics with company metrics. This gives you trending to see the social media activity against overall results. You won’t be able to prove causation, but it does help see patterns.

Don’t Be Afraid to Engage Your Audience In Your Cause

So you’ve built a large Facebook base. Now give them an assignment.  Jay described how Austin-based Sweet Leaf Tea turned a normal “Where do I find” request into an engagement exercise by having fans take a “Dear Shopkeeper” letter direct to their favorite store.  The company sales team started seeing the requests AND new orders. Great evidence of  retail conversion through social media.

Jay presented many more examples of measurements than can be helpful in our quest to understand social media behavior. See his “Social Media Measurement – A Six Step Process” to see more information from his keynote.

What can you do today to start understanding the behavior of your Social Media users? I look forward to your thoughts!

– Don Kincaid

Next Up – Doug Karr and How to Drink from a Firehose