Finishing "Measure What Matters" and Final Post

It's been real y'all and unfortunately, as my social media class is coming to an end, this will be my final blog post on "Connecting with Casey." I'll discuss this subject further at the end of the post.

In other news, I finished reading "Measure What Matters" and am back to give you the scoop. As I mentioned in my previous post, the book is a bit of a dry read. Paine, the author, also gets more repetitive as you go along but I think this is acceptable and helpful given the guiding nature of the text. As I did with the first six chapters, I will list the three things I found the most helpful from each of the remaining chapters below:

Chapter 7: Measuring the Impact of Events, Sponsorships and Speaking Engagements

1. Organizations sponsor events to launch a new product, encourage relationships with customers or get to new markets and customers
2. Decisions must be backed with supporting data
3. In-depth phone surveys are the most reliable

Chapter 8: How to Measure Influencers and Thought Leadership

1. Successful relationships with analysts and influencers result in product recommendations
2. It's not enough to track blogs that mention you and your marketplace most frequently, you need to make sure they are important
3. Define your audience as specifically as you can

Chapter 9: Measuring Relationships with Your Local Community

1. Today, neighbors can be virtual or physical
2. Publics expect organizations to have corporate social responsibility
3. If publics can't easily reach an organization, their complaints will be heard on social media

Chapter 10: Measuring What Your Employees Think

1. Employee relations impact sales and bottom line
2. Employees are bombarded with so many messages per day making it difficult for yours to get through to them
3. Internal blogs can be a great source of feedback

Chapter 11: Threats to Your Reputation: How to Measure Crises

1. Trust, commitment and satisfaction are vital but take time to earn and are very fragile
2. Listening to your audiences is essential to avoiding and dealing with crises
3. During a crisis a company needs to have a system in place to analyze and deal with the effects

Chapter 12: Measuring Relationships with Salespeople, Channel Partners and Franchises

1. Salespeople are a category of public all their own
2. If communication with salespeople is not strong, relationships are weakened
3. You gain some control over image by quantifying media messages and who is exposed to them

Chapter 13: Measurement for Nonprofits

1. Relationships are more important to nonprofits than any other organization
2. You must define your measurement goals based on your mission
3. You have a variety of stakeholder groups that must be prioritized

Chapter 14: Measure What Matter in Higher Education: How to Get an A in Measurement

1. Reputation is crucial to universities
2. The needs and interests of university audiences are very different than corporate audiences
3. The ultimate goal is to put more into student's education

Overall, I found Paine's information and guidance on measurement to be very interesting and useful. I would highly recommend this book if you are a company or brand who needs a guide to measuring its social media information or if you simply have an interest in social media or public relations.

As for my departure from "Connecting with Casey," I have really enjoyed this experience and am planning to eventually create a lifestyle blog focused more on veganism, fashion, and life in general. Thanks for reading and I hope you found interesting information or, at the very least, entertainment on my blog.

See you somewhere else,
Casey