The Media Rating Council (MRC) has issued an official set of social media measurement guidelines. In conjunction with the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, the MRC has released an in-depth 40-page document, which outlines common practices.
Also participating in the development of these guidelines were social media vendors, publishers, measurement organizations, ad servers and ad networks. In addition, the guidelines were reviewed by buyer-side trade organizations.
According to this article in Media Life Magazine, these guidelines cover methods used for measuring a number of types of social activity, including tracking and counting users accessing content within social media, interaction and/or engagement with social media content,
and consumer “listening” and sentiment. The guidelines also cover the measurement of user-generated content and video.
The article includes these excerpts from the guidelines:
“In order for a user-action to be considered part of social media audience activity it should be trackable/measurable (publicly or privately), fall within the campaign time period (for campaign level or advertising counting) or defined measurement period and include all valid traffic.”
“Examples of trackable/measurable user-action may include interaction (clicks, shares, retweets, likes, favorites, etc.) with social media content, application downloads or social shares from a brand website to social media platforms.”
The Media Life article also provides a direct link to the guidelines.
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