[A List of Goals and their Measurement Strategies]

(1) Sales - Goal conversions, some identifiable increase in conversions through social media. In the Boston AMA we've seen increased retention rates among members involved in social media.

(2) Higher SEO Rankings - Build a list of keywords and monitor the rankings as you develop content and an outreach program around those keywords.

(3) Crisis Communications - Conduct sentiment analysis to determine the overall opinion of your brand in the community, and how it moves up and down. Dell discovered in 2006 that they had a negative sentiment rating of 49% in the blogosphere, over an 18 month period they managed to get that down to 18%.

(4) Thought Leadership - Here's a combination of metrics, sales, higher seo rankings, and sentiment rankings.

(5) Customer Service - Does social media reduce your expenses in customer support? Typically in a forum community members will support other community members. Outsource your customer support to the community. Intuit has done this with their online products, reduced expenses, and increased product innovation by building a customer advisory board.