A colleague asked me for my thoughts on trends in social media today. I can sum it up in one word: convergence. From the communications sector, to measurement, policy, social data, and job responsibilities, the sector is converging. In this blog post, I walk through how social media is converging in these areas, and the forces behind convergence.

Social media measurement is so often led by what data you are able to capture, not by what questions you are trying to answer. Measurement, simply put, comes down to three data sets: whether or not the conversation compelling enough to create engagement, information about who is more and less engaged within your social media channels, and whether or not your social media efforts are producing desired results. This blog post considers what data you really need to know to measure effectiveness, and how deep to dive.

How might we use content to develop and deepen community within our own own social media channels? What content do people REALLY engage with, why is that, and who is engaging? With the right approach, any organization should be able to identify content that engages its community, optimize it, and create deeper community engagement using community-based content curators. Knowing which questions to ask and what data to track is the first stage of content-based community-building. Knowing how to optimize it for community-building is the goal.

M & R Strategic Services and the Nonprofit Technology Network have just released a critical report about Facebook benchmarks which seems to validate a lot of current assumptions, and sheds light on previous unknowns. The report analyzed Facebook Insights from July - December 2011 of 37 very large nonprofit organizations, such as the AARP, Human Rights Coalition, and Oxfam America. The resulting report offers some insightful benchmarks for large nonprofit organizations: average number of Facebook fans, the reach of a Facebook update, who sees the updates, the average number of people who will be Talking About This per 1,000 Facebook Fan users, and more specific benchmarked types of engagement.

I've been talking and thinking a lot about measuring social media engagement with colleagues, nonprofits, and social media activists. Two years ago, those of us participating in social media engagement and strategy were trying to come up with "the" metric to define social media tactical success. And then social media practice evolved, as did the thinking about measurement. In fact, it's crystal clear to me now: measuring Return on Engagement (ROE) is actually two measures: SMART goal Return on Engagement, and the ROE of Community Commitment. Using these two metrics, an organization can get a pretty good sense of whether or not its online activities and strategies are working, and whether or not it is building a community of committed stakeholders.

I had the pleasure of presenting a workshop entitled "Data Driven Leadership" at the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network/AGM annual conference last week, along with colleagues Marc Baizman and Steve Backman. The question we addressed in the workshop was: what online data does a leader want in order to make informed decisions around programming, advocacy, fundraising, and advocacy? Marc, Steve, and I have expertise in analyzing Google Analytics, understanding customer segmentation and databases, and identifying social media metrics, respectively. Each of us thought about how the data from our respective area of expertise could address this question, and demonstrated how to find those answers during the session. We also created a DIY worksheet for the session entitled, "Make Your Data Work for You: A DIY Worksheet." It offers sample questions to get you started thinking in the areas of marketing, programs and services, development, and volunteers and advocacy.

Facebook's newly-revised Insights is such a significant change that it is a game-changer in the social media space. With the new Insights metrics, Facebook is boldly telling the Facebook community and its competitors that the most important social network metric is real online engagement. Everything about the new Facebook Insights is focused on helping page administrators understand how well their page's content is being received, shared, and talked about within Facebook. Facebook believes that you should know and need to know how engaging your content really is. And they want you to do something about that. In this post, I analyze why it is such a bold move, why engagement matters, and what a game-changer the new metrics has become. This is the future of measurement.

Without engagement, social media ultimately fails. However, you can design your social media activities to create online engagement, which is the focus on my presentation. The conference presentation covered five core concepts about how to design real online engagement for the highest return on engagement: numbers do not equal return on engagement, you can design social media activities for real engagement, how to leverage relationship ties organizationally to convert fans to superfans (and increase ROE), aligning SMART goals with engagement design, and three approaches to measuring ROE: community commitment, fan trust, and SMART goal achievement.

I had the pleasure of presenting on the topic of Ramping Up Your Facebook Engagement to a group of NYC nonprofit organizations last week. The presentation covered understanding Facebook post engagement, matching goals to engagement, practices for designing Facebook Page engagement, practical ideas for creating engagement on the Page based on recent research, and measuring engagement and ROE. During the presentation, I also heard about some great ways that nonprofit organizations are using Facebook successfully to engage and move people to action.

Measuring engagement is critical. If we don't know how engaged people are in our social spaces, we won't have a clue if our campaigns to move them to act will work. I think there are three kinds of measurements: status, engagement, and activism measurements.