Pat LaPointe takes some folks to task about the nebulous metrics of social media measurement tools. Now, I don’t necessarily agree with the ultimate premise — that social media measurement shouldn’t get money because ROI is fuzzy. However, it does bring up the issue for me that measurement of social media ought to have specific goals, such as:

• Baseline understanding: what’s our competitive position or share-of-voice?
• Location: where are the conversations happening that are important to the company, brand, industry, etc?
• Sentiment: are there glaring issues with perception of us?
• Trends: what’s the general context of the conversations? Do participants talk about us the way we expect?

Based on initial baselines, you’ve got somewhere to go — somewhere to move the needle. Can you make a difference through some kind of tangible engagement? What will have the greatest impact? If we change the way we talk about us to be more like what people say about us in social media, will it have a positive result on some other metric?