Seven Steps: Measure What Matters

In the book, Measure What Matters, there are six steps laid out for measuring relationships with your communities and neighbors. I thought it would be beneficial to go through each one and summarize each one in a few sentences because these seem to be very important to measuring what matters in social media.

Step 1: Agree upon Solid Measurable Goals That Are Tied to the Bottom Line
-This step is like measuring any other business relationship: It is about gauging the strength or weakness of your reputation among your greater community by starting with a clear goal. Choosing a goal that is attainable is very important and is crucial to having relationships with communities.

Step 2: Define Your Publics
-This step is all about defining your community and publics. Who you are trying to reach through your business pitch is super important. Without it, there is no way to isolate your actions or your relationships.

Step 3: Who or What Are Your Benchmarks?
-This step is pretty self-explanatory. Setting benchmarks is an important step as well. It is important to compare the strength of your community relations to something or someone else such as other communities or peer organizations.

Step 4: Set Your Audience Priorities: Who and What Is Most Important to Measure?
-In this step, you should prioritize your audiences and stakeholder groups. For each audience, determine at least one measure of a successful relationship.

Step 5: Choose Your Measurement Tools
-In Step 5, you should select measurement tools (obviously). Start with a relationship survey, or a local media analysis. These two things are crucial to healthy and strong relationships with your communities.

Step 6: Analyze the Data
-The next step is to analyze the media content to determine whether or not your community messages are being communicated. One way you can do this is find residents from your local community to read and code the articles or items, because only they will respond to them as your target audiences would.

These six steps could definitely help when it comes to measuring relationships with your communities and neighbors. Which one do you think is the most important?