• by George Gallate , Op-Ed Contributor, July 8, 2015

All social media has to be measurable, repeatable and massively scalable. Marketers invest considerable time in it as a key medium. It is powerful – and needs to pay back. Here are the top three goals that every CMO should drive to achieve and tips how to achieve them.

1.  Share of voice – If you want to be an industry leader, you have to sound like one. Leaders are seen and heard, steering the direction of the market. Social media provides brands a way to get their voice out there at a large and impactful scale in a real-time way. Brands need to consider how often they are mentioned, the size of audience as well as the engagement of the key players in that audience to understand reach.

Tip: Engaging employees to tap into their network and positioning them as thought leaders reflect well on your brand. Tapping into influencers to get awareness among their network is important. Expanding your network to relevant audiences, your employees, clients, influencers and partners are good ways to do that. Frequency and consistency here can be important.

A tweet has a very short shelf life, while LinkedIn has a longer shelf life, but both are important. A listening tool will help you measure your KPIs in this area. To achieve your objectives, you can have social enablement training for leaders and key execs as well as social facilitation.

2. Positioning as a thought leader – Social media provides brands an opportunity to share all the insights discovered by the company. When you have an intelligent group of people, thought provoking content comes pretty naturally, and social media is one very effective avenue for getting it out there.

This content, as well as generally insightful social messaging, is what helps the market understanding the level of thinking happening at companies. Engagement such as clicks and retweets are the best measurements of your quality of content and thought leadership.

Tip: Positioning a brand is about quality. Low quality content, such as video, poorly written papers and blog posts, reflect subconsciously or consciously on your brand, and they make it less likely someone will take a risk by spending time consuming your next piece of content. Quality is also reflective of application. A video blog post doesn’t need the same quality as an advertised video on YouTube. What will be most important is the insights you provide.

When you and your employees say smart things, people listen. And when you say smart things in a visual way, they listen even more. Imagery and videos help catch the eye and tell a story in a more engaging manner.

If you stay ahead of the curve on chatter, insight and news, you will also position yourself as one of the few sources of information when something is hot, making it more likely to be shared.

3. Lead generation – Social media can be an effective lead generation and nurturing tool, something many marketers overlook to their own detriment. If you have the strategy, process and proper tracking and analytics in place, you will see results.

Tip: To make social a successful lead generation channel, you need to have an analytics platform in place. This way you not only prove it works, but track what content performs well among new leads, find consistencies and optimize your strategy.

I have the ability to see if a new lead came from Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn, or if an existing lead or client engaged on one of these channels. To capture those new leads, it again comes down to network reach.

It is also prudent for sales people to follow their prospects to understand more of the prospects interests and needs, then chime in with something helpful when the time is right.