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Everything you need to know about social media measurement was covered in 45 minutes at MediaPost’s OMMA Social event in San Francisco last week.OK, that’s not entirely true, but the five panelists I had the honor of moderating covered a lot of ground. They probably could tell you everything that matters — if you gave them just a little more time to do so. There is a lot of ground to cover, as you might have inferred from my column on 100 ways to measure social media.

Instead of trying to rehash the session, I’m letting the panelists share their thoughts in their own words. Below are a series of questions that I either asked during the session, I planned on asking, or the audience asked. Note that I shortened this version somewhat for readability; the “director’s cut” is on my blog.

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If there’s anyone out there left who says you can’t measure social media, here are a hundred answers.

At most of the events I’ve been to lately, measurement continues to be a hot topic. The first question that comes up is, “What can I measure?” That’s where this cheat sheet can come in handy: a list of 100 thought-starters.

Some entries here can be interpreted several ways. Depending on how you define them, some of these metrics may seem redundant, while others may seem so broad that they can be broken out further. Many of these can be combined with each other to create new metrics that can then be tracked over time. It’s a start, though, so dive in and consider which ones may apply to programs you’re working on.

1. Volume of consumer-created buzz for a brand based on number of posts
2. Amount of buzz based on number of impressions
3. Shift in buzz over time
4. Buzz by time of day / daypart
5. Seasonality of buzz
6. Competitive buzz
7. Buzz by category / topic
8. Buzz by social channel (forums, social networks, blogs, Twitter, etc)
9. Buzz by stage in purchase funnel (e.g., researching vs. completing transaction vs. post-purchase)
10. Asset popularity (e.g., if several videos are available to embed, which is used more)

Read the rest of the list after the jump »

This month, I had the pleasure of speaking at Strategy Institute’s Digital Media Measurement & Pricing Summit. It sounds wordy and dry, but there were some great presentations spanning all forms of digital media, from TV to billboards.

My talk was on user-generated content metrics, and thinking about the subject, I found that the ways to measure it fall into four main categories:

1. Anecdotes: Getting the gist of the buzz by a handful of observations

2. Visualization: The size and maybe direction of the buzz becomes more apparent.

3. Quantification: This answers the ‘how many’ and other hard data questions.

4. Analysis: Now you find out what it all means. Read the full article