WEB METRICS GURU — I’m working on summarizing tracking Social Media Outreach for the Havana Central Restaurant chain – the same Restaurant chain I did a case study of a few months ago presented at Columbia University Alumni Club. Up to now we enabled Google Analytics tracking on the website to include all downloads, all outgoing links, all email links (via Google Analytics tracking scripts), all reservations to OpenTable, Tell A Friend, Get a Quote, VIP Guest List, etc. While a few more things could be done – much of Social Media isn’t going to show up in site analytics, as I pointed out last week, unless the website is part of  the transaction, and we have a way to segment the activity – we’ll never know if all the activity that happens as tweets, check-ins via FourSquare, promotions on Social Media, or even the Facebook Fan page  – translate into more reservations being booked, more people showing up at events, more money being spent in the restaurant locations...

MASHABLE — Recently I wrote about the differences in social media monitoring and measurement, as well as the importance of doing both. However, taking the first step to actually start monitoring can be daunting. And then what? How do you act on what you find when listening? How do you engage? To ensure that you are successful in your monitoring and measurement efforts, here are some definitive steps you should follow. I’ve developed these throughout my career and as part of my regular listening, participating and contributing to the space...

THE SOCIAL TIMES — Scout Labs is designed to help brand teams tune in to social media across the Internet. Scanning blogs, forums, Twitter, news, photos, videos, open social networks and more, Scout Labs takes all of that data, counts it, trends it, analyzes it, scores it for sentiment and extracts interesting customer quotes and emotions to present what customers love, hate, want, wish, think, and feel about a brand right now. The application in a sentence: Scout Labs a real-time social media search engine that is continuously scanning the web for the voice-of-the customer, processing the data and displaying it in a real-time dashboard...

SOCIAL MEDIA EXAMINER — For Microsoft’s Xbox support team, there’s no such thing as unwanted messages on Twitter – no matter how vulgar they may be. So why is a $58 billion company spending time listening to off-color tweets? Because "foul-mouthed tweens" just might be the first tip-off of a major service outage. Before any calls or emails come in, the support team can catch a tweet and get technical folks on the task. This article reveals how the Xbox team relies on Twitter to reduce support costs...

VISINSIGHTS — I’ve been reading and participating in Forrester "Wave" reports for years and it’s always interesting to see how people react to the vendor technology evaluations in these reports. Sure, it’s always great to be selected as one of the companies to participate and we are certainly thrilled to continue to be ranked as one of the top providers in the industry, but for me the real value of the Wave Report goes far beyond which companies were named "Leaders" and "Strong Performers." The inside information and trend data collected and synthesized by the lead analyst, in this case the extremely knowledgeable Zach Hofer-Shall, is usually as valuable, if not more, than designated vendor bragging rights for the next 12 months...