Great piece from Katie Paine yesterday: “Your Quick and Easy Guide to Measuring Social Media.”
One metric I’d add to several of her answers is website traffic (for dot coms, anyway). The key is determining whether your goal is broad market awareness, or to drive sales, or both.
Kari, you are absolutely right. Web metrics and web analytics are incredibly important metrics not just for measuring the effectiveness of social media, but for measuring your PR program as a whole.