One of the most common questions I'm getting these days is "how should I measure the value of all the social marketing things we're doing like Twitter, Linked-in, Facebook, etc.?" My answer: WHY are you doing them in the first place? If you can't answer that, you're wasting your time and the company's money.

In a trade publication last month, marketing guru Al Ries proudly declared that "determining the ROI of a marketing program is an expensive exercise with little or no value -- an experienced marketing executive instinctively knows whether a marketing program is working or not.". He countered one CMO's perspective on the value of analytics, by concluding that the practice of marketing "is not even 1% mathematics." With math-bashing marketing hand grenades like this, it's not surprising that the column sparked a healthy response; readers are still submitting comments that wrestle with Ries' assertions. What is surprising, frankly, is that "quantifiable …

Since I began contributing to the Online Metrics Insider in September of 2007, I've written extensively about the fundamental differences between panel-based data, which provide behavioral tracking of the whole of Web usage from a sample of persons over time, and which may be projected to a particular user population; and site-centric server data, which provides a "census" of the behavior exhibited by machines, and specifically servers, at one Web entity. Site-centric server data is often thought to provide empirical, immutable measures of the visitation to a Web site, but in fact server data is simply a tally and classification …

I recently saw a terrific presentation by Steve Smith, CMO of Enterprise Car Rental, in which he outlined the fairly comprehensive approach they were taking to measure the payback on their marketing investments. Here are a few highlights.

Between the pouring rain and bolts of lightning, MediaPost held its first OMMA Metrics & Measurement conference at the Yale Club this past Tuesday. The room was packed and the panels put forth some lively discussion and debate for the audience to ponder. For those who were not able to join us, let me recap a few highlights for you.

If you had anything to do with the Obama presidential campaign, you have not indulged in any post-election relaxation. Instead, you've been taking calls from conferences wanting you to speak. For the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Jose last August, I was lucky enough to get Mark Skidmore, Director of Advertising & Promotion at Blue State Digital on the podium.

When I was younger and stupid, I used to spend lots of passion, energy, and time around the development of terrifically insightful analyses. "Look at what the numbers tell us," I would proclaim. After days or weeks of combing through the hairiest of data sets, I'd emerge with new strategies for rationalizing the sales force; reallocating marketing spending; moving R&D dollars from one project to another; or providing better service to more valuable customers. All ideas that would have made or saved the company lots of money. Relatively few of them ever got implemented, however. Somehow, people always managed to …