I agree with your assessment on the engagement piece – the difficult part is defining what engagement is. Engagement can be considered time spent, repeat visits, watching a video, posting or sharing something…etc. When purchasing media that is action oriented, one has to determine the value of the action in order for the transaction to take place between publisher and advertiser. So the focus of the article was to identify the models that are evolving to distinctly capture the action-based metrics of social media and how that relates to brands buying that kind of media online.

As for the quality of the person you are interacting with and whether the interaction with them improves how they value your brand, I agree that measuring via surveys is almost the only way that you can go. Tracking positive/negative sentiment through volume of comments/posts is also another way that I have seen it indexed to track “customer satisfaction” (if you will) over time.

Thanks for your comment – I appreciate it.

Jodi

I would define the value of the social spend as

Length of Engagement x Some quality index for the depth of engagement x an optional variable on the importance of the user, as determined by demographic characteristic or a CRM database match

Thoughts?