However, it was interesting to note the example of Bill Marriott’s blog – CEO at Marriott International – which has led to more than $5 million in bookings using the reservations link placed on the blog. It’s a prime example of just one way a blog can be used as dynamic portal for inviting readers to a site through valuable content, connecting the blog to sales opportunities, and properly tracking the site’s usage through proper analytics. Good metrics need to be in place for any blogging or social media strategy – a tactic Viget also discussed in The Washbiz Blog.

You can check out the full article here.

He advised marketers to create conversations with consumers using a simple, short and free online survey created by Iperceptions.com, an online research firm. The survey asks: Who is coming to your website? Why are they there? How are you doing? What do you need to fix?

The surveys “get customers involved in fixing things,” he said.

The marketing team worked with MotiveQuest to research and measure what people were saying online about the car and Mini brand, and through their analysis, created the the Online Promoter Score in order “correlate the relationship between marketing and online brand advocacy to sales by measuring the net frequency of people recommending a brand online.”

Mini and MotiveQuest scoured more than 30 million online conversations to find 52,000 people who were talking about Mini. Listening to what online communities were saying about Mini helped shape how the car company works with bloggers, who are now treated as members of the press and are invite to be among the first to test drive new cars or even podcast from events.

But at the end of the day, it all comes down to sales. And how does Trudy Hardy, manager of marketing at Mini connect the online buzz with moving Minis off the lot?

“…while Ms. Hardy said the metric doesn’t “tie back directly” to sales, it correlates web traffic and online conversations to actual retail traffic.

“So we definitely see some correlation between online activity and how that affects showroom traffic,” she said. “We look at the spikes that are going on in conversations and see if it measures against an increased amount of traffic to our site, which ultimately leads to an increased amount of leads we send to our dealers.” (Via AdWeek)

Similar to Facebook Lexicon or even Google Trends, Twist is a dead-simple tool for tracking the frequency of keywords in Twitter. Developed by the good people at Flaptor, Twist allows users to see the trend of searched terms over time.

Ideally, as conversations continue to leave the blogosphere for other digital outlets, hopefully more services like Twist will emerge as useful tools for brands to track and measure these conversations.

But that doesn’t stop great people from trying, and nor should it.

Technobabble has posted a great white paper, “Distributed influence: quantifying the impact of social media,” which is a must-read if you haven’t already. I’m still working through it myself, and will post my thoughts on it later.

Be it my Netvibes start page, imperative reads like Techmeme and Digg, or even using Basecamp at work to easily compile and manage projects, I’m increasingly grateful for tools that help me collect, sort and analyze information.

And while I’ve enjoyed using Google Analytics’s continuing improvements in measuring my websites’ growth, there is one sphere of analytics that I am hopeful will take off in the next year.

Social media metrics. It’s a mammoth undertaking given the sheer scope of blogging, social networking, videos and online communities, but any tool that can help make sense of the wealth of conversation taking place is worth it’s weight in gold.

Enter Scout Labs. Sure, there are other dashboards on the market like BuzzLogic or Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics, but I’m excited to see what Scout brings to the table. Techcrunch has the write-up (including screenshots).

The really cool part of the product is the fact that it looks at historical data, too (as I said, back to January 2007). So a brand manager can create a new scout and within moments see how the number of daily, weekly or monthly mentions increases or decreases, and how they fluctuate from negative or positive over time. I could easily see how periods where we were heavily criticized for something led to an increase in negative posts, and vice versa.

I’m looking forward to trying out the service when it’s released from beta, but in the meantime, does anyone have a preferred dashboard for providing some level of social media measurement?

UPDATE

While this original post only briefly touched on a few tools for social media dashboards, The Buzz Bin has a killer collection of ideas, tools and strategies for measuring social media.

Except when you’re not sure where it’s going. Buzz is beautiful, but not if you can’t measure it.

Enter Vidmetrix. The new service allows users to automatically upload videos to YouTube, MySpace, Metacafe, Google, Yahoo, Revver and Veoh. But the beauty is in the tracking – from your convenient dashboard, you can track the video’s views, comments and blog links.

Through a score card that measures strength of blog, Facebook ranking, mini-updates like Twitter, LinkedIn ranking, Flickr ranking and Digg score, they’ve developed a weighted index to analyze who influences the web.

“So what does this last list mean? The overwhelming majority of new entrants to this more ‘pure’ Social Media Index are individuals which is probably not surprising given that corporates or even collectives don’t really use Twitter or Facebook . . . people do. Obviously each platform has different primary functions and some are much more personal (Facebook) than others. But bloggers quite openly use Twitter and Facebook and MySpace to market their blog posts and many blogs these days have widgets cross marketing the individual’s Facebook or Twitter profiles. And the personal and the professional was a line blurred for many of us years ago.”

I’ll need more time to review their methodology, but I already raise my morning latte in their general direction for taking a creative step to more comprehensively measure social media influence.