5. Accelerating revenue
New product introductions create a golden opportunity to track how quickly and effectively your company is creating awareness. Measure traction and uptake by collecting metrics on new product or service page views, starting from the launch date and extending out into day 1, day 2, day 3, etc. Building and tracking separate landing pages for new products and key marketing campaigns create an opportunity to measure interest. Depending on how your campaign is configured, the interest can be from both digital and non-digital PR and marketing efforts, especially if the non-digital components include drive-to-web messaging.

Here's a social media example from the Apple MacBook product introduction. It's a chart from Technorati Trends showing the number of blog posts containing the term "Apple MacBook." The announcement date was Oct. 14.

This is a great example of a company's well-oiled PR machine generating a lot of interest. Note that the product was announced on October 14 and garnered close to 3,700 posts on that day. Also note how quickly blog activity drops off, which points to the short shelf-life of news in the blogosphere. This illustrates the importance of building an A-list of bloggers to keep in the know about new products or services. 

Here's another example from the Apple MacBook that shows how quickly bad news about a product can travel and, in some cases, even rob you of sales. Note the number of Digg tags this story got in slightly less than 24 hours:

Looking at this comment, it appears Apple lost at least one sale, and probably many more:

This is important feedback for a product manager to have. This example should help open up your thinking about social media monitoring as a way to see what is happening with your brand and your products in the real world. Your objective is not to manipulate the conversation, but to monitor and respond to it instead.

6. Reducing cost to serve
Self-help is a good thing if self-help sessions are successful. Success is in the eye of the user, so include a "did this solve your problem?" question at the end of every support listing. Track and report on responses to identify the type of content that helps and the areas where you need to overhaul the information you provide.

Also, track search activity to identify new support listings that need to be added. Some companies are going so far as to make capacity decisions for their call centers by using their online help activity as an indicator of self-service adoption. As online volume increases, they are decreasing headcount, which is a direct contributor to the bottom line and ROI -- unless, of course, everyone is saying that the self-help is not solving their problem. If this is the case, you know that some content tuning is in order.

I'll close with one important point to keep in mind: A clear and coherent strategy that aligns your digital presence with ROI drivers is the bedrock for a successful measurement and optimization program. Strategy creation, strategy execution, and measurement and analysis are all disciplines; they don't happen by accident. Having all three disciplines aligned and pointed in the same direction will go a long way toward answering the question of "Where's my ROI?"

Happy measurement, everyone!

Chet Geschickter is director of strategy at Molecular.